[Note: This post’s title has been updated to reflect new claims from Barnes & Noble disputing that they’ve overstated battery life. See bottom of post for details.]
One of the new-and-improved features that Barnes & Noble promoted yesterday when it announced its new touchscreen Nook was a battery life of two months. Two months! Theoretically, if I got one in mid-June, I would only have to charge it three times before the end of the year. By contrast, my Kindle 3 only claims one month battery life, and in reality I have to recharge it every week and a half because I leave the wireless connection on all the time.
But CNET reported something strange today: overnight, Amazon doubled its battery life specs, and now it says the Kindle 3 will also last two months.
Your first thought, especially if you’ve been viewing the new Transformers 3 trailer online recently, might be that your Kindle 3 is evolving and will soon become self-aware and deadly. Not as deadly as those movies, but still.
But you can relax; what this really means is that from now on, you’ll have to view estimated battery life numbers skeptically, because it has now officially become a bit of meaningless marketing copy for Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
You can blame B&N for this one. As part of the company’s aggressive strategy to position the new nook—officially and unfortunately called “NOOK, The Simple Touch Reader”—B&N has isolated the most extreme usage scenario to support its battery life spec, trading accuracy for sound bites. To make one of the latest E Ink 6″ ereaders last two months, notes CNET (by way of both Amazon and Kobo), you’d need to keep the wireless turned off and only read it for about 30 minutes a day.
Kobo’s CEO Michael Serbinis tells CNET that in fact, the new Kobo touchscreen reader, which has the same size Pearl E Ink screen and same infrared touch technology as the new Nook, will also last about two months—if you almost never use it. “But that’s not a typical usage scenario,” he concludes.
So when you comparison shop ereaders in the coming months, assume that, at least for the big three brands, if the hardware is about the same then so is the battery life.
Update: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Barnes & Noble stands by its claim that the new Nook far outlasts the Kindle 3 on battery power. The company’s digital products president says B&N performed a page-turn test, similar to the one Jordi B. suggests in the comments below, and “In our side-by-side tests, under the exact same conditions, continuous use of the device resulted in more than two times Kindle’s battery life.” From the paper’s Digits blog:
While reading at one page a minute, the new Nook battery lasts for 150 hours where the Kindle battery, using the same page-turn rate, lasts for only 56 hours, said Jamie Iannone, president of Barnes & Noble’s digital products unit, in a statement issued Wednesday. The company has also done a continuous page turn test and at one page turn per second, the new Nook offers more than 25,000 continuous page turns on a single charge, he said. (All the tests were done with Wi-Fi off.)
