Does Shuffled Row drain your battery?

[misscrabtree]

Hello,

My battery seems to be draining quickly on my DX.  The only thing different is I added Shuffled Row and played a few times.  Whispernet is off.  Is this game a huge battery drainer?

[identicaltriplets]

I personally haven't noticed that when I had my K2. I have only had my K3 for less than 24 hours so not sure yet on the K3.  I will watch for other posts. I am curious now.

[Linjeakel]

I've never played it - you can't get it in the UK - but does it involve a lot of screen refreshes? That would drain the battery.

[Ann in Arlington]

With "Shuffled Row" it is pretty much continually refreshing the screen, so it seems reasonable that the battery would drain a little faster if you play it a lot. . . . . .

[Just Wonderin]

From what I understand, every time you click your Kindle, battery power is used.  I too had the whispernet shut off of my K2i while playing Shuffled Row and my battery drained so fast it was scary!  I thought something was wrong with my Kindle.  I had just charged my Kindle...played the game...and then shut the Kindle off.  I never did look at the battery meter.  About 2 hours later, I went to use my Kindle again and got this screen that my Kindle was Critically Low!  I had never seen that screen before.  I never allowed my Kindle to ever run that low.  I recharged it and thought that I might have just thought I recharged it before playing.  I played the game again (not for very long...maybe 15 or 20 minutes), shut it down, and when I returned to the Kindle, the same thing happened.  I haven't played the game since.  I hate seeing that "Critical" status.

[Shawna]

I know playing Every Word really drained my battery.  Between the keystrokes and screen refresh, I wasn't too surprised.

[VondaZ]

I didn't care for Shuffled Row, but I do play Every Word, and I can say that my battery drains much more quickly when I play Every Word than when I read a book. I imagine Shuffled Row would be the same. I haven't worried about this, it seems to be natural and not a problem with the Kindle or the game.

I think it is more than the refreshes, because I seem to remember reading that the games are designed to only refresh the part of the screen that changes. However, there is probably a lot more processor type activity going on when you play a game than when you read a book - to determine whether the letters you are choosing are available to you and to determine whether the word you enter is in its dictionary, then to determine how many points you get and add that to your point total, to determine what letter comes next and display that letter at the appropriate time and place, and keeping a constant timer going and handling the events when the timer sets off an event. When you read a book, it just has to retrieve and then display the text and it does very little when you are actually reading.

[Thalia the Muse]

Yeah, Every Word really sucks up the battery power.

[GreenThumb]

Oh, that's too bad!  I really enjoy Every Word.  I thought it was all the indexing, but I bet Every Word is why I have had to charge so often. 

[Ann in Arlington]

I played 'Shuffled Row' for at least an hour last evening and did not notice any appreciable battery drain.  This on a K3, wireless off.

[Matthew W. Grant]

I've been playing Shuffled Row every day on a K3 and I do have to recharge the battery weekly.  I do use the 3G briefly to check a few websites each day, but I shut off the wireless as soon as the pages load.  I end up recharging at least once a week so it's much more often than the one time per month for reading only.

[Me and My Kindle]

I think it's true for all games.  They drain your battery, because they're re-drawing things on the screen much more often.

Think about what happens when you read an e-book.  You press the next page button, and a new page of words is drawn on the screen. But then you just sit and stare at that screen, until you're reading to hit the next page button. So the screen refreshes maybe once every 30 seconds.

Nearly every game you play on the Kindle involves some kind of re-drawing every few seconds, so that's going to drain the battery a lot faster...