I charged my 4g 20 GB ipod on Friday morning, and right now the battery icon is more than half full. Now maybe I’m just lucky, but mine never discharges that fast if it’s not getting use.
Don’t know what kind you have, but I put in quite a few miles of running every week with my Nano, and it has never cut out.
I was anti-Ipod. Got my nano as a gift. Love it.
I’m sure there are players that are just as good though.
To clarify: I charged it; ensured it was switched off; applied the switch that (supposedly) locks the keys off, in order to avoid the risk of accidentally turning it on; and put the iPod in my bag. Hey presto, 12 hours later I discover that the “hold” switch has become purely decorative at some point, and the damn thing has been on and playing all day. Well not all day obviously, as the battery only lasts about an hour.
Well, if the Hold button on your unit is defective, that’s a legitimate gripe and I withdraw my sarcasm. 
A nano won’t have problems with jogging because it’s in solid-state storage. (say that three times fast!) A HD-based iPod… well, it’s like trying to jog while using your laptop. There’s delicate moving parts inside, and rhythmic bouncing is not conducive to their flawless working.
Don’t iPods have pretty ample “skip protection” (i.e., a solid state buffer) to protect against bumping? I thought it was at least 9-10 minutes.
Well, a buffer gives you uninterrupted playback, assuming the buffer doesn’t run out before you can start reading from the disk again. But that’s just mitigating the effects; the bumping being bad for the hard disk is a different matter. While a lot of the new drives have funky protection systems that put the read heads in a safe place when they detect bumps, it’s still far from ideal, and if you constantly subject a hard disk to changes of acceleration over its lifetime, it’s likely to fail a lot sooner.
Yes, that’s all I meant.