A friend here at work bought a Riot a couple of months ago. It worked fine for just over a month and then suddenly started showing a "Battery is nearly empty" message. The only thing you can do is press a button to clear the message which will reboot the unit. And show the message yet again...

Support told him this was a known problem and to drain the battery, reset the unit, recharge, etc... He's gone through this a number of times in various combinations. No go.

I saw that someone else here had a similar problem which was resolved by a reset. Anyone else have this experience? I've shown the Karma pictures to a few people but now the concern of QC has come up.

Can he expect any reasonable turn-around if sending the unit in for repair work?

Bruno

There are comments in the 1.25 release notes about power issues being solved (although not directly the one you mentioned). It may be worth an upgrade before he sends it in, assuming he is not already running 1.25 that is.

There was a very good explanation and fix for this problem located at...

http://www.rioworld.org

However they had a hacker attack and lost the info. I have a printout and will retype the post here. This procedure helped to calibrate my Riot. Constant battery drain is just “life.” Upgrading the firmware to 1.25 may help a little but not much. The problem is probably a battery “memory” issue. If this doesn’t work and you need a new battery you might want to start here….

http://www.panasonic.com/industrial/battery/oem/chem/lithion/index.html

Calibration procedure per “Rio Expert”

1, The player need to be used until you get this message: “Battery almost empty. Connect wall charger to continue,”

2, Leave the player turned on, and plug it into the charger.

3, After a 6 or 7 hour charge the player will then need to be used until “low” appears where the battery bar is. At this point the player will be calibrated and ready for regular use. If it isn’t:

Drain the batteries again and perform a full recharge to calibrate it again. Now that’s double calibration.

Calibrating the batteries improves battery life, Double calibrate, one calibrations after right after the other generally does it each and every time.