better battery life and improvements
Notebooks continue to represent a popular choice among small to
medium-sized enterprise road warriors. And while maximum battery
life is a principal feature, buyers must weigh notebooks' power
consumption advantages against trade-offs in performance.
Indeed, despite growing demand for PDAs, handheld PCs, and other
mobile devices, users often prefer notebooks' keyboards and
screen sizes when crunching numbers, checking email, or
preparing PowerPoint presentations. The challenge for OEMs has
been to boost notebook battery lives while packing the machines
with increasingly power-hungry CPUs and graphics processors.
The Trade-Off Factor
The ultimate goal? To offer the same capabilities that
high-powered, battleship desktops offer in a notebook form
factor that can run on battery power alone during an entire
workday or transcontinental plane ride. Unfortunately, the gap
remains between ultra-high performance, power-draining
processing power, and long notebook battery lives.
"It's a battle between end user wants for better battery life
and improvements in technology that sometimes require more
power," says Howard Locker, chief architect for desktop and
mobile development at IBM's personal-computing division.
"Battery life is also a trade-off between weight and size. You
can put a bigger battery in a laptop to get more battery life,
but it will weigh more." Notebook battery life is largely taxed
by the applications running at a given time and the power of the
CPUs, graphics processors, and other components, which must be
scaled down to reduce power consumption. "For a longer battery
life, a trade-off in performance is thus necessary. It might
take a little longer to do things, but if something takes four
seconds instead of two seconds but your battery lasts another 45
minutes, then that is a good trade-off," Locker says.
"[Designing] intelligent power management by detuning functions
and performances that are not needed is critical."
Battery-Life Kings
So which notebooks on the market offer the longest battery
lives? The answer varies according to many performance variables
and form-factor preferences, but Tablet PCs from Electrovaya
(www.electrovaya.com; 905/855-4610) and notebooks from IBM
(www.ibm.com; 888/839-9289) stand out, says Rob Enderle, an
analyst with the Enderle Group.
"In Tablets the Electrovaya Scribbler is the clear winner with
nine hours of battery life, but of course you would kind of
expect this given Electrovaya is known for its work in
batteries, not computers," Enderle says. "The IBM T Series, with
its large battery, used to be the segment leader with around six
hours of battery life."
So what are Electrovaya's and IBM's secret sauces? "The
Electrovaya uses a special high-capacity battery, and IBM's
product has a combination of a large battery and a system tuned
for battery life as opposed to performance," Enderle says. "The
Electrovaya also has a special high-capacity battery that is
unique--or at least for now."
So what are the trade-offs involved? "Both products are slow to
use, particularly if you run a suite of virus, antispam, and
anti-spyware offerings," Enderle says. "However, once the
applications are up and running, the performance hit doesn't
seem as bad, and many users can get used to it."
Several components are responsible for the performance hit vs.
long battery life in the IBM T Series and Electrovaya offerings.
"What is causing the performance hit is slower moving drives,
which may at times actually spin nearly all the way down between
reads, processors working at a fraction of their potential on
battery life, dimmer screens, and lower power fans," Enderle
says.
Electrovaya largely attributes the Scribbler's long battery life
to its patented LiIon, 75 watt-hour battery. The SC2100 also
features a 1.3GHz Intel Centrino processor, a 12.1-inch display,
802.11g wireless capabilities, and an 80GB hard drive and weighs
in at 3.5 pounds.
IBM's ThinkPad T43, introduced last month and available in
April, weighs 4.5 pounds and is also equipped with an Intel
Centrino processor that supports up to 2GB of DDR2 system
memory. According to IBM, the new T43 can offer up to eight
hours of battery life while running office applications,
including Internet connectivity with an 802.11 connection.
Battle Of The Form Factors
HP (www.hp.com; 800/752-0900) this month attempted to shake up
the battery life sector with the launch of the HP Compaq
6220/6230 notebook series that the company says can offer more
than nine hours of battery life when a travel battery, which is
sold separately, is added. The notebook's form factor enables
the travel battery to be attached directly to the notebook so
that it is simultaneously operable with the integrated battery.
The notebook series, which offers Centrino CPU clock speeds up
to 2.13GHz and a memory capacity of up to 2.048GHz, weighs in at
5.99 pounds when the travel battery is attached.
In addition to the Intel Centrino processor that offers
SpeedStep power-saving controls and Intel's Display Power Saving
technology for the screen--which represents the most significant
power-draining component--HP also says its patented NIC
technology helps to lower power consumption on a BIOS system
level.
Nine hours is also a realistic benchmark for the HP Compaq
6220/6230 notebook series when running typical applications,
such as accessing the Web and checking email with the Centrino
chipset's 802.11 capabilities, using a word processor or other
applications, the company says. "Nine hours is a realistic test
of what you would experience while sitting in a conference room
in a, God forbid, nine-hour meeting," says Herman de Hoop, a
worldwide technical marketing manager for HP.
ASUS (www.asus.com; 888/678-3688) also represents an OEM with a
consistent notebook offering that at least keeps the vendor in
the battery longevity notebook race. The company also relies on
Intel's Centrino to regulate its latest M3Np notebook's
power-saving features at clock speeds of 1.30GHz to 1.70GHz.
With ASUS' Power4 Gear power-consumption technology, the company
maintains the M3Np can operate more than five hours. The M3Np
weighs about 5 pounds.
A 10-Hour-Plus Battery Life?
So what is in store for next-generation long-battery life
notebooks? OEMs will likely continue to rely on power-saving
capabilities of CPUs, as well as BIOS and other system tweaks to
reduce notebook power consumption in future models, but no
breakthroughs in battery technologies are in store for the near
term. It will likely be several years before battery lives
extend beyond 10 hours, which will probably involve replacing
power-hungry LCDs with new display types, Locker says.
"I don't see battery life [extending to] up and beyond 10 hours
[in the near future]. Inventing a new technology to replace the
panels with OLEDs, for example, would do it, but that is four to
five years out," Locker says. "However, [OLEDs] will also
probably represent the next breakthrough on a system level
For more information on laptop batteries please visit the Laptop Batteries Resource Center