My iAudio battery was giving up on me. It is now 4 or possibly 5 years old (I got it one Christmas), and so, I thought, “I’ll replace it!”. No doubt you can do this for most MP3 players, especially those years out of warranty like mine 😉
I found some handy instructions and site pointing on the iAudiophile forums. Megacapacity had the ticket, a suitable fitting battery. Presto chango, I got one in the post (from Hong Kong so took a few days).
Yesterday I did the operation. I managed to open my MP3 player pretty easily. Got a soldering iron off my Dad to get the old one out and new one in – doing this I also got rid of one wire since it just wouldn’t reattach (after I knocked one end off) despite me trying for a while. It isn’t a necessary wire at least, connecting to an unused bottom connector (well, at least I hope so, I can still hear it playing at least 🙂 ).
The finished work. Note extra wire and old battery.
I tried out the battery today (on a trip to the NMOC). Previously, it honestly had only a 50/50 chance of turning off after immediately taking it off the mains power (sometimes I had to keep it plugged in to initially boot it). It was worse with the original firmware, I now have RockBox on which is good (apart from lacking a “Normalise” function, the only downside of the firmware). Originally it then lost its charge fast, and leaving it for a few hours even if you don’t use it lead it into “Cannot start low battery” mode.
Now however it held it’s charge, after listening to 3.25 hours of podcasts, probably isn’t even 25% down (it’s really hard to tell on the screen). Not sure how long it’s back up to run-time wise, I’ll have to try it out on a long haul (perhaps a trip next week), and hope that it keeps going for a while longer. I can’t afford a new MP3 player yet, although it’d not be bad if I could get a larger then 20GB one next time 😉 – this is a good money saving tip if your battery does die too. Cost me £16.79, which is much more affordable then an entirely new player 🙂