Battery life in airplane mode + audio?

[pattib]

I'm heading to Europe in a few days, which means I'll be spending lots of time on airplanes and trains. I have a really excellent MP3 player that gives me about 40 hours of battery life, but I'd rather not carry yet another gadget if I can get away without it.

Does anyone know what sort of battery life I can expect with the Droid in airplane mode, but playing audio? My guess is that it should be pretty good, since the screen seems to be the primary battery suck, but if anyone has solid information I'd love to hear it. Thanks!

 

[RinTinTigger]

Hey,

watch THIS

[video=youtube;5MiCazSsEWg]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MiCazSsEWg"]YouTube - Motorola Droid: Battery Life Test[/video]

He gets it to 7 HRS! BUT he has the Network radio ON,

so your DROID should hold up to it, just regulate brightness down to like 40%
and turn of WiFI Bluetooth and 3g networks and stuff, that should do it!

 

[pattib]

He had the screen on all the time. Since the tracks I listen to are about an hour long (episodes of This American Life), I have no need for the screen. You're right, I should be OK.

 

[RinTinTigger]

It would nice to have a feedback over this issue, because this is interesting for a lot of guys!

 

[pattib]

I will update this discussion after spending some time with the phone in airplane mode listening to audio.

 

[pattib]

OK, here's what I know.

My methodology was crude: use the phone, with a fair bit of it in airplane mode listening to audio. The audio tracks I'm using are each about an hour long, so I can count the tracks to estimate my audio usage. Look at the percentage of battery remaining, and the percentage of battery used by the media player, and use that to estimate the percentage battery drain per hour for listening to audio.

I did this twice. For the second one, the battery was at 50% when I checked it, I'd listened for three hours, and the media player had used 6% of the battery. The first one was similar.

Based on that, I estimate that listening to audio on an otherwise-quiet phone uses about 1% of the battery capacity per hour. It's easily possible that I'm off by a factor of two or more, but I'll go out on a limb and say that listening to audio doesn't drain the battery very quickly.

 

[Backnblack]

Nice video....When I travel by Air, I carry a backup battery that I picked up at BB. I use my laptop to charge it via usb, then it can charge anything that uses usb.