Listen To This: Battery and Memory

Before we get to the exciting Listen To This finale, we have one more stop to make on the road to High Fidelity.  Tonight, I want to take a quick look at the battery life and memory capacities of these players.  Obviously, these are pretty important stats.  Without good memory capacity, you will find yourself listening to the same song time and again.  Without battery life…well, you are going to be one frustrated listener.  So, let’s take a closer look.

We can start with the battery.  Like I said, without a good one, you are going to have a very short and frustrating listening experience.  There is really not a terrific way to test battery life, and I will admit that my method was not terribly exact or scientific.  The best way I could find to test the batteries on these devices was to charge them all up, hit shuffle and let them go.  I left them sitting on the dining room table, quietly shuffling from 8:00 am until the respective batteries each faded into oblivion. 

The Creative Zen X-Fi (left) and Sansa View (right) lost it first.  They both lasted somewhere between 10 and 12 hours (remember, this was music only, video would significantly decrease battery life further.)   The other four all fared significantly better, with the Samsung YP-P2 lasting close to 20 hours.  The iPod, Zune, and Sony all came close to the 24 hour mark. Like I said, though, this was a pretty unscientific test, and the difference between the top three was slim enough that it could well have been within the margin of error.  We might as well call that a tie.

Memory capacity is another story entirely, and is all too easily measured.  We can start with the Samsung, which weighed in at a depressing 4 GB.  While this might be sufficient for a small music collection, but toss in a video or two and you are pretty much wiped out.  Yes, there is also an 8 GB version, but let’’s be honest, the 4GB is already one of the more expensive media players in its class. 

Both the iPod Nano and Creative Zen X-fi weighed in at 8Gb, however, the iPod also features a 16 Gb version.  The Creative Zen, however, comes only in 8 GB.  The Sony, Sansa View, and Zune were all 16 GB players, which is really the minimum you should look for when buying a device which is intended to be used for all media types.  With movies that can take up well in excess of 1 GB, not to mention photos, and more, space can quickly become a premium.  I would venture to say that 32 GB is ideal, but 16 GB is certainly satisfactory.

What I found really surprising was that this memory playing field can be easily leveled, but most of the players chose not to do so.  In fact, only the Sansa View and creative Zen X-fi offer the opportunity to add an external media card.  Given the size of many media files, this should be mandatory.  I think the Sansa View took a slight edge over the creative Zen because it offered the much more versatile microSD instead of the bulkier SD cards.

In the end, both of these ended up being almost no contest at all.  The Sandisk Sansa offered the most memory (16 GB with a 32 GB version available) and the ability to expand through a microSD.  While some of the others offered comparable built in memory, none of them offered expansion through external memory. 

Similarly, battery life offered little contest with the Zune and Sony outlasting the others by a significant period of time.  The closest contender, the iPod Nano lasted several hours less and it just got worse from there, with the Creative Zen X-fi lasting a mere 10 hours.

I have to say that I found battery and memory to be a real weak spot for many of these media players.  All of them expect you to be able to play video, yet they give you an inadequate amount of memory to store the videos.  With today;s technology, there is really no good excuse for not including an external memory card.  Likewise, although there is not the same opportunity to add battery power, device manufacturers simply must find a better way to supply power.  Whether that means using solar power or working with developing power technologies, the batteries in many of these devices are not adequate for an extended trip…especially if you are watching video.

Stay tuned, because coming soon we will be wrapping up this series with the exciting finale.  I’ll go back through all of the articles in this series and give you my final recommendations.  If you are considering buying a portable media player, you will not want to miss it!  And if you missed any articles in this series, be sure to check them all out, here.

Related posts:

1. Listen To This: The Big Finish
2. Listen To This: Photos
3. Listen To This! The Great JAMM Portable Media Player Showdown. Part 1: Introduction
4. Listen To This: Watching Video
5. Listen To This! The Great JAMM Portable Media Player Showdown. Part 2: Hardware