News

Battery life: an honest label?

Did AMD's Nigel Dessau have the HP EliteBook 6930p in mind when he "questioned the wisdom" of the all-day computing slogan? Maybe not: it's hardly the only laptop to be promoted with the tag - but it certainly isn't an AMD-based box!

Dessau's point is a good one: the EliteBook battery life stats are pretty kosher, but lots of others are pretty spurious. He remarks:

Someone just sent me an advert alleging 12 hours of PC battery life (nine cells), promising “all day computing”. It reminds me of one of the questions I am getting on the battery life conversation.

It goes something like this: “MobileMark®07 is the one everyone uses and it shows how long the battery will last at idle. I understand that’s not the battery life I’ll experience when actually using the system, but isn’t it useful to show how long it will stay on?”

Is that how we want to show a PC’s battery life – while it is effectively doing nothing? It does allow you to say, “Hey, if I do nothing with it, it will last all day!”

Good point, indeed. Would his logo work? It would look rather spectacular on the 6930p in "top power-saver" mode. That has been greeted as the first 24-hour PC. But you do have to spend a little extra

When it was launched, a BBC report remarked that "the new HP EliteBook 6930p can be configured with an ultra-capacity battery" and used the trigger phrase: "to deliver 'all-day computing', which appears to have irritated AMD.

HP illustrated 24-hour battery: "It means travellers can take more than 10 trips on the Eurostar between London and Paris before recharging their laptop."

But the 24-hour figure "can be reached only by purchasing the ultra-capacity battery and upgrading the base model of the 6930p to include the Illumi-Lite display and 80 gigabyte version of the solid state disk, concluded the report.

Here's the bit that probably caught a raw nerve at AMD:

"Intel architected its new line of high-performance solid-state drives specifically to bring a new level of performance and reliability to the computing platform and make significant impact to the way people use their PCs," said Randy Wilhelm of Intel.

"The HP milestone is an example of the impact of this new level of performance that specifically delivers on lower power consumption for longer battery life."