5G battery upgrade

[Cassandra]

I've just (apparently) successfully upgraded my battery in my 5G 60Gig iPod.  If booted straight into Rockbox on insertion of the charger (which in itself is a little peculiar, I suppose - maybe because I forgot to turn the hold switch off after the upgrade, and the battery monitor seems to be indicating it's taking a charge OK.

I'd rate the upgrade as moderately tricky, and much easier than upgrades I've done on the H120 and Archos recorder.  I heartily recommend the instructions provided by batteryship.com, although I actually bought the battery from batteryupgrade.com (which was the highest capacity I could find at 950mAh - no idea why there's didn't come with instrucitions - I think it was supposed to).

We'll see how performance goes in the next few weeks.  In the meantime I'll note in passing that upgrading the hard disk at the same time doesn't look as though it would have been at all difficult.  Total time taken was 10-15 mins.  I am not a highly accomplished techno-god, so it's probably well within the reach of anyone brave enough to be willing to open their iPod (and, presumably, thereby void their warranty).

Total cost of this upgrade UK£18.61.

[soap]

Does the ipod fit together as tightly as new after being opened?

[Cassandra]

Yes.  The clips seem to take care of that quite nicely.

[pheebster]

Thanks for the info! I heard that the battery in the 5G was soldered in and not user-replaceable. It's nice to know that is not true.

[Llorean]

I believe the Nano 1st Gen is the one that's soldered in.

[Cassandra]

Thanks for the info! I heard that the battery in the 5G was soldered in and not user-replaceable. It's nice to know that is not true.

No, only secured with a tacky glue.  Careful use of the pry tool is enough to get it out, and the glue then happily holds the new battery in place.

[pheebster]

Thanks for clarifying things for me . I'm not as PO'd at my iPod now, since I won't have to pay Apple $60 to replace the battery when I am perfectly capable of replacing it myself with an aftermarket one.

[Cassandra]

I got almost 8 hours of battery life out of my first run.  This is, I think, an improvement on the standard firmware, but still not anything like as good as the increase in mAh rating would seem to imply.

[dommo]

Is there any more news on the runtime with that "uprated" battery?

Thanks

[Sambolina3]

I don't really see the point of upgrading the internal battery when my external one lasts for 45 hours  

[Cassandra]

I'm probably going to back out this upgrade, since the new battery keeps becoming disconnected.

[yurake]

hi Casandra!!!
i have a question for you-help if you can!!!
how long the ipod-video 30gb (5g)-must work- in 1 charge-
whith Rockbox firmware
i try it and there where something about 5 hours why?
whith apple firmware it works more than 10 hours
what i can do?
thanks!

[Cassandra]

I don't know exactly, as (a) I have a 60G Ipod, and (b) it varies from battery to battery.  What I can tell you is that Rockbox is known to be more battery hungry than the original firmware.  This is because no-one has yet written assembler-optimised codecs for the arm architecture, so it's a bit less efficient than the native firmware.  Historically Rockbox power consumption has continued to improve as the platform matures and people optimise the code, but this has yet to happen.

If we had as many programming resources working on the revelant (low-level) parts of Rockbox as Apple do, then things would be a lot quicker, but we're all volunteers and things get done when they get done.  As you can appreciate, to write assembler optimised codecs you need to (a) know assembler and (b) understand how the codecs work.  These are both rare skills.