iPod’s Tired :( iPod’s Ready :)

1 minute

November 5, 2002

There are few things more crushingly soul-destroying than picking up your iPod on the way out the door, hitting play, nestling your headphones in your ears only to the hear the sound of …. nothing. As it's run out of juice. Happened this morning. Oh, and has anyone anywhere ever got near 10 hours of use out of one?

So wouldn't it better if the iPod's design more obviously communicated its status i.e. if you could tell at a glance that it was tired.

If the iPod had the shape and coloured-screen characteristics of Fukasawa's phones and glowed a particular colour and shape in order to communicate information about its status i.e. if we build on the idea of the fake 'breathing' that the TiBook/iMac does when in sleep mode, and really give it some useful behavioural characteristics. If the whole thing changed colour to grey or reddy-orange when running out of power; or the screen and touchscreen-wheel glowed a healthy green or white, to indicate that it had plenty of battery-life. Or deployed large emoticons. Or all these things.

The current power-indicator is too small, too variable, too abstract, and too invisible at a distance. This kind of information could be communicated by visible behaviour:

Now you know why I don't work with Jonathan Ive, but you see what I'm getting at.

5 responses to “iPod’s Tired :( iPod’s Ready :)”

Graham Hicks

November 6, 2002 at 11:38 am

My hiptop does the green/yellow/red flashing scroll wheel to indicate battery power and I actually find it pretty annoying. That could be the execution of it though, it is dark for about three seconds, quickly goes to bright green, then quickly back. If it were a more natural cycle it might be less attention grabbing.
It is a good idea though (and an increasingly important one as more devices become battery powered). Maybe if the screen just became a giant battery indicator when the iPod was “off.” All of the pixels on the screen are filled when charged, and they disappear from right to left as the battery weakens. Or even just a big “minutes of play time left” clock since that what a user really cares about.

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paul schutze

November 8, 2002 at 9:17 am

I have never had a moment more than five hours playing time form my ipod. Often it is far less. You are right in sugesting some behavioral modifications. The battery meter is perfectly useless as “tired” can be situated anywhere between three out of a possible five bars and two bars. Such coarse calibration is nonsensical given the sophistication of most of the user interface. As you say there is nothing more crushing than boarding the bus for a journey made only just bearable by the sheltering privacy of Queens of The Stone Age on eleven to find you are out of juice. The happy face idea might perhaps be replaced by an audible 30 min remaining warning. This could be turned off only to appear on screen if it offends but it would give you the chance to prioritise your remaining time and remind you that despite Mac’s claims and the fact that you charged the unit yesterday it will require charging again tonight.

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nat

November 9, 2002 at 6:55 pm

i’m not a fan of the glowing colors idea, but apple definitely needs to refine it’s battery monitor. as it is now, it’s virtually useless. i don’t think i’ve ever gotten more than five or six hours of use out of my ipod, and i also don’t think i’ve ever seen the battery indicator go below three bars. at least every other week, i’ll leave my house with my ipod showing 3 bars in the battery indicator only to have it run out of power after only a few minutes of playing.
i’ve been told that using the equalizer, the skip buttons, and random playlists all increase battery usage and shorten the life of a charge, and i understand that, but at the same time, it’s kind of ridiculous to think that someone with several thousand songs on their ipod is only going to listen to them in alphabetical order or one album at a time and is never going to skip any. hopefully, apple will address some of this in future firmware releases.

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Graham Hicks

November 9, 2002 at 8:35 pm

Maybe using something like the SplashPad or The MobileWise base will make charing batteries less of a chore, which means battery life is less important.
Although the best solution would be products that charge themselves.

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Brian

March 27, 2003 at 8:50 pm

All is great now. 1.2.6 gave my iPod battery 10 full hours and some change.
Good stuff!!!!!

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