What is the real battery life people are getting from experiances ising the 2800 while live route tracking please?
IE for hiking or mountain bike trail riding etc.
Curious to know if it would last a full day hiking use.

I get 7.5 - 8 hours continuous use.
I've done a couple of 3 day wild camping trips, on those I just turn it on to navigate. After 3 days I still had the full four bars of charge showing.
As long as you turn it on at least every hour it gets a lock in 10-15 seconds which is pretty much how long it'd take you to get a map out, unfold it in the right place etc.
It also joins the tracks up, of course you loose the detail of when it was switched off but it was good enough for me.

I get around 6 hrs with the backlight set on 30 sec & full brightness. The extended battery gives another 4-5 hours. The battery life will obviously vary with the number of screen activations. Reducing the brightness will increase battery life but is not practical on a sunny day.

Best I've had is just over 7 hours, with 30 secs backlight at 80% brightness. Recently I have mostly used it for cycling but I tend to devise a route as I go so perhaps 5 minutes screen-on time every 20 minutes. I almost never use "follow route" and more often than not when I'm out I'll only draw a route to check the profile and then delete it.

I tend to get 6-7 hours on the bike, following a route and occasionally checking my position.

I've done a couple of long bike rides recently (7-8 hours) and when the unit runs out of juice it just dies and you tend to lose most or all of the track - shame it doesn't save as it goes along.

It does, it saves the current track every 10 mins.
If you happen to be looking at the screen you'll see the egg-timer thing appear.

not for me it didn't - my battery died right at the end of a 97 mile ride (7 hours) and when I recharged the unit and switched it on it had only saved about 3.5 hours of the ride - the rest was lost.

These posts started in 2009, its now 2012 and I have a new memory map 2800 - 19 days old and the best I can get is 6 hours.
Three years on and no one has improved the battery - I wish I had discovered this forum sooner - the time I have spent trying to get the software to work and find andything remotely resembling a user manual - I this Memory Map is taking the P out us