Just curious on what peoples experiences with the battery life of the iPod Shuffle is?

I've now had mine playing for pretty much 6 hours straight at work yesterday, about an hour on the bus and walking home last night, about 2 hours here at work this morning and when I press the battery status button it still lights up green!

Its a slight improvement over the normal iPod!?

So are people getting a max of 12 hours, or are you getting more than that? Were Apple conservative with their battery life estimates?

Realtime battery life depends on your listening habit, bitrate of the songs, etc...

I believe official battery life (12 hours) is tested with 128kbps AAC files.

You probably got better bettery life because your music files are encoded in relatively low bitrates.

Not a chance.. i'd never encode in anything less than 160kbps!

Most of my music files are 192kbps MP3's...

That's interesting, seeing how iPod mini also exceeded the normal battery life stated by Apple.

So... you're getting battery life of more than 12 hours, right?

Apple seems to have been extremely conservative with their battery rating on this iPod. I'll get anywhere from 18-22 on average.

Was planning to buy one though...just wondering how long will the battery last? wat i mean is the charging cycle...how many times can this be charge? if the things reach it end of battery life span, will we have to replace the whole thing or does it consist of a replacement unit (guess not)....

I think after all the criticism Apple got about the batteries when the 3G was around, it would have been smart on Apple's part to be more conservative about battery life. The latest revision of the iPod minis latest for something like 26 hours (non stop, default volume, no backlight, ect) in a test done by iPodLouge.