Zune 30 Battery Life Issues? Yes!
I purchased the above White Zune ( now Zune 30 *sigh* ) about 2-3 months ago from Woot! and have been absolutely LOVING it. The Zune pass alternative for unlimited downloads for $14.99 per month, in my opinion, is FAR superior to paying 99c per song. That was my main reason for not purchasing an iPod. Though the lack of a native Mac Zune Marketplace client for my MacBook is a bit annoying, but using Parallels has been easy enough, and it hasn’t been a problem. In fact there haven’t been ANY problems…
Until I upgraded to the new Zune 2.2 firmware that is.
Sure, the new menus, snappier speeds, and podcast support are all fantastic, and the new Zune client makes it even easier to find new bands, find the bands I love, download and subscribe to podcasts, etc. Hell, it even adds an almost Apple sense of eye candy and artistry to the process (GASP!) Unfortunately, this new firmware for my Zune 30 has also caused a serious issue.
The battery dies after just a few hours, even if the device is OFF!
That’s right, the battery drains while my Zune is freakin’ OFF.
Generally my morning routine is as follows, I grab my Zune off the charger, with a full charge in the morning and go to work. I listen to some music at work for usually about 45 minutes, and then listen to some while I drive back and forth from lunch. I maybe do 2-3 hours total of listening to music during the course of a day. After lunch, I turn my Zune off (both the soft shutdown by pressing and holding play or hard shut off by holding down the down key and the back key simultaneously), I activate the hold switch and put it into my laptop bag. When I put it away i usually have about a 3/4 charge remaining on the battery.
So I go about my day of work, and at 5pm, I take the Zune out of the bag to listen to some music on the drive home.
Before the upgrade: I’d happily listen to my music.
After the upgrade: I get the battery dead symbol!!!
What. The. Hell!?
Apparently, somehow or other, the battery continues to drain even though the unit is powered off entirely! (Just for tech support purposes, I have the wifi shut off at all times.)
My few calls to Microsoft Tech Support have been expectedly unproductive, ranging from total denial of a problem , to explanations that my Zune’s warranty doesn’t cover this. To add to the problem, I’ve seen a lot of people with Zune 30s having the same or similar battery issues on Zune Scene forums. Hopefully this story will make its rounds, and I might just get some sort of response from SOMEONE on the Zune Team, and hopefully will eventually lead to a firmware update that will fix the problem.
The bottom line is, obviously the new Zune firmware did NOT go through much of a beta testing phase, and where the original firmware was at a rock solid stage, it seems like we’ve taken one step forward only to take 3 steps back as far as reliability goes. How am I supposed to get any use out of an MP3 player that dies 8 hours after you charge it, whether its on or off? Its ridiculous!
If any of you out there have had a similar issue, please feel free to leave a comment on this article. Let’s see if we can get a response!
UPDATE:
After consulting with some people on different forums, I was told to do a hard reset of the Zune, to format it and reflash the firmware. I did so. After a cursory test of the results, it’s still the same crap. Same problems, and now all of my music has to be redownloaded to the Zune. Fun.