This applies to the original "Kindle 1."
I wanted to know how long the battery would last -- long enough to read the hours away on a trans-Pacific flight? I searched the web: "Oh, yeah, it lasts a long time!" and "Oh, gee, yeah, several days between charges!"
Amazon.com's web-site was similarly vague and unscientific: "...read for days without recharging..."
These testimonials would make good copy for an episode of "Oprah!," but they didn't satisfy this engineer, and they didn't answer the question: "18 hours from DEN to CAN (Denver, CO to Guangzhou, PRC) -- could I while away the hours reading a good book on my Kindle?"
What was needed was a rigorous "engineering experiment," so I got a "BasicStamp - Board of Education" single-board computer from Parallax, Inc., hooked it up to a standard S3004 Futaba radio control servo, and programmed the board to drive the servo to push the "next page" button on the Kindle every 30 seconds. I used Kindle text size #3 to display Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon" -- my reading time for this text size was about 30 seconds per page. The Kindle's radio was off during the entire test.
Here is what the test setup looked like:
And here is a close-up of the servo:
Click the servo photo above to see a 3-second video clip that shows the servo pressing the "next page" button: (200KB, .wmv format)
Screw the survey, experiment says!
"25 continuous hours of turning a #3-text-size page every 30 seconds on one battery charge!"
For those of you who can't "do the math," that's 3000 "page turns."
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