While Apple is still working hard on ways to extend the battery life of the next generation of iPod's most only have a battery life of a few hours before they need recharging. During this article we will look at a number of different ways in order for you to improve the life of the battery in your iPod Nano.

But first let me explain what battery life means. This is the time that your iPod Nano will run for before it needs to be recharged, it may sometimes be referred to as "playtime" or "runtime" by some people. Whilst battery lifespan relates to the total amount of time that an iPod Nano battery will last before it actually has to be replaced.

Now below we provide some tips on how to extend the battery life of your iPod Nano for any given charge cycle and which will help you to conserve power.

1. Hold and Pause

This may seem a bit obvious but by setting iPod's hold switch when you are not using it will prevent the iPod controls from inadvertently waking up the iPod and so it ends up using unnecessary power. Also when you are not listening to your iPod Nano then put it on pause or just turn it off completely by pressing the play button for about 2 seconds.

2. Optimize your Settings

There are a number of different features on your iPod Nano which can cause the battery to drain more quickly. So if you do not use these features then you will find that it will play music for longer for you. So try some of the following and this should help to conserve your batteries life for longer.

a. Backlight. Do not have this "always on" but instead only use it when it is necessary.
b. Equalizer. By adding EQ's to your playback you will find that it uses more of your iPod Nano processor and these are not encoded songs. So turn it off if you do not use it. But if you have added EQ to tracks in iTunes then you will need to set EQ to "flat" in order to have the effect of being "off" but it will keep your iTune settings intact.

3. Use Compressed Songs

You will find that your iPod Nano cache works more efficiently when the songs are of average file size (so less than 9MB). So if you happen to have large or uncompressed files then you may decide that you need to compress them or you may want to use a different compression method from the one you are already using.

Hopefully the tips that have been provided above will help you in the future with improve the battery life of your iPod Nano.