The app I’m working on has the ability to easily take your iMovie project or QuickTime movie and push it over to iTunes where it can then be synced with your iPod. In order to ensure this feature worked I purchased a 30G iPod video (aka 5th gen iPod).

It was about a week ago that I received the iPod from amazon, charged it and let it do it’s super lengthy sync (5GB’s of music, some video and 5700 photos took quite a while (guestimating it was about two to three hours)). At the end of the sync I made sure that the home movies I encoded and imported into iTunes via my app were indeed viewable on the iPod and they looked great. I then continued to snag some other content to play with via iTunes. Note: If you like stupid things and are looking to waste two or three minutes of your day, I suggest AskANinja.com. It cracks me up (at least the episode titled “roger” did), but I’m told from others that it’s really not that funny. Oh well, on with the post.

After a day or two I noticed the battery life was horrible. I’d listen to an audio podcast on my ride home from work and when I got home, I’d turn on ‘hold’ and then leave the iPod in my jacket pocket sitting idle. When I woke up in the morning the battery was dead!? Coincidentally, the same day I started coming to terms with the poor battery life, I found “How to accurately determine your iPod battery life” in NNW via Hivelogic Links. I ran the suggested test and my iPod’s expected 14 hours of audio playback turned out to be just over 3 hours. I ran the test again this morning with the identical results.

Now it’s time to try out Apple’s “iPod Service Request”. I’ll post my results as they happen, but from the looks of it I expect it to be as easy as:

• Apple sends me the packaging to ship the unit back in (pre-payed)
• I package it up in the supplied box and send it to Apple
• Sometime later I get some other iPod back.

Unfortunately it seems the iPod they send back could be a refurbished model. That would be sad, but somewhat understandable. Not sure if I would know or not. Hopefully not. I’d much rather just assume it was a brand new replacement unit.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 7th, 2006 at 10:25 pm and is filed under Apple, Complaints, Hardware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.