… at least when running rockbox. ;-)

[Update: 15 hours, my > 1 year old regular X5, starting at a measured level of 91%, but which increased to 94% first ;-) So the battery lifetime gain is pretty much the factor 2.5]

[Update: the X5 is sold as having 14 hours of runtime; which usually is a too high value, and measured with 128 kbit mp3 - I’m using lots of oggs, and mp3 up to 320 kbit; so I think the rockbox firmware actually uses less power than the official one!]

So far, the biggest drawback of using the opensource Rockbox firmware on the iAudio X5 was battery life. I got only about 6 hours out of my X5.

However, current CVS versions include a patch to solve this - apparently it powers down the USB OnTheGo chip and maybe the radio chip, too. Saving huge amounts of power. The unit also doesn’t get warm anymore.

My battery benchmark is still running (somewhere around 12 hours now I think); and in the forums, users have reported battery lifetime of 30 hours for the X5L version.

So if you are already using rockbox you might want to upgrade; if you have been kept back by the bad battery performance - it’s time to switch to rockbox now, and get all the goodies you’ve been missing for so long!

That is: gapless playback, crossfading, album art, next song information, bookmarks, quicker startup, playback resumes where you powered off etc. I think I read about some audioscrobbler/last.fm plugin, too.

Apparetly most iPod models are also supported, and rockbox has Ogg Vorbis support… one of the reasons I bought the X5 was vorbis, back then.