Originally posted by: svi
If a minidisc player can get 52 hours of playback from a single "AA" battery, there is absolutely no excuse for a paltry 14 hours from a lithium ion cell.
Sure there is. First off, change "minidisc player" to "flash player", and change 52 to 35. Those neato ultra-low-power minidisc players and CD players have weak-ass headphone outs, let's compare apples to apples here, at least sort of.
Look at the battery lives of other flash players that use internal li-ion cells. Notice anything funny? Almost all of them offer a lot less battery life than AA-based comparable players. Why is that? It's simple: the only reason manufacturers go li-ion in the first place instead of AA/AAA is to save space. It's cheaper to have users put in their own batteries, and it's better in the long-term, but AAs are almost as big as some flash players by themselves.
All this is obvious, I know, but it raises a point: there is a perfectly good excuse for this low battery life. Look at the form factor of the iPod nano and try to visualize how much internal volume there is (remember, the casing isn't paper-thin). Think about how deep the click wheel and screen probably are. Consider how much flash memory is crammed into the things. How much space do you think they had in there for the battery? And that's not even going accounting for that that screen probably eats more power than the teensy ones on the flash players I was referring to.
I agree, of course, that 14h is pretty low (I do manage with that with my X5, though). I just don't think it's fair to say there's no excuse for this. The engineers behind this device are probably more than competent, and would likely not appreciate being told that it's shameful how low the battery life for that particular device is.