My battery life is aweful, what's wrong?

[mitts2010]

Well I bought an iPod touch on Tuesday, and well, I Jailbroke it right away, but for some reason the battery life is really bad. Any ideas? I turned open SSH off completely, still no help.

[kornchild2002]

Well, what exactly are you doing and what is the battery life? Keep in mind that the Apple estimates for audio playback use different specs than what you probably use. Apple sets the brightness to 50%, the volume to 50%, they use the stock earbuds, and they use the 128kbps AAC format (notice, no VBR) with an average song length of 4 minutes. They setup a playlist (or just tell the iPod touch to play every song in its library) and then walk away. They don't touch the iPod after it has started playing. Apple does the same thing for video playback but they use the 1500kbps video bitrate standard and the videos have a resolution of up to 640X480.

If your battery life is terrible while browsing the internet with auto-brightness turned on and the brightness turned all the way up then don't worry, that is normal. Remember to always turn off auto-brightness (I don't think it does much of anything really) if you want to save battery life. The screen brightness also helps out substantially and turn wi-fi off when you aren't using it. The two biggest consumers of battery power on the iPod touch are wi-fi and the screen (mainly its brightness and how many times you touch it and/or make the backlight come on).

[paranoidxe]

Well I bought an iPod touch on Tuesday, and well, I Jailbroke it right away, but for some reason the battery life is really bad. Any ideas? I turned open SSH off completely, still no help.

You just bought it, the battery gauge is wildly inaccurate for the first few cycles..it'll get better.

[DerekVOF]

Biggest battery killers are Wi-Fi and the screen. So, surfing the Internet will kill your battery very quickly. If you leave your brightness high or leave Wi-Fi on all the time, you'll not get long battery life. If you search the forums, BlackWolf did a battery test a couple months ago which provided some good information on battery life.

If you think you're getting really poor battery life, you can follow Apple's instructions to check - http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61475