Palm M515 battery life?

[mikeford]

I picked up an old Palm M515 cheap enough on ebay, $58 shipped, and I have fully charged it a couple times, but with all sound off, backlight on, looks like I am getting about an hour of game time which seems low.

850 and 1000 mah batteries are about $10 to $15 shipped, so I am not that concerned, but didn't want to go ordering a new battery if that is actually close to normal life.

 

[i game with a gateway]

did the owner you bought it from use it regularly? IIRC, you cannot change the internal batteries on palms. it's been like that, they are built in and if you want a new one, you send it in. i wouldn't think of replacing the battery yourself unless you know exactly what your doing. that is an older model so my guess would be the battery aged. my M130 got hours of battery life during gaming and that was at highest backlight and sound on and that time has gone down since i purchased it years ago but i use my 4150 more than my palm.

 

[mikeford]

Ipods suck to change the battery, Palm M515 is 4x torx screws, open carefully, old battery is glued in and needs to be prised out carefully, don't disconnect until ready to connect the new one, make sure its oriented properly, swap the connection, button it back up and charge for 3 hrs. http://www.batteryship.com/battery_instructions/UP383562A.pdf great instructions, $29 is triple the shipped price on ebay.

Changing the drive in our Archos mp3 player was a bit more challenging, but really just more time. Ordering a new battery now, the 1000 mah I think.

 

[larciel]

Yeah it's about what I used to get when I had it.

around 1:30h was what I had.

 

[mikeford]

I ordered a 1000 mah, an hour or less of backlit no sound just isn't enough for me, hopefully the new battery will do at least 2 hrs.

On the plus side the battery does recharge VERY quickly, like 10 to 15 min from almost dead to almost full.

 

[mikeford]

Hours after ordering a battery I just happened to turn on the M515 with the backlight off when I was sitting in a chair with a nice light behind me so I didn't bother turning the backlight on. Rats, more than 4 hours later I was still showing about 70% left on the battery. Makes no sense to me that the backlight uses so much battery, but looks like it does.

 

[eelw]

I can get easily 5+ hours with the backlight set to the medium setting with my m515. That's the only think stopping me currently from upgrading my Palm to the TX - battery life.