Better Battery Life And Improvements

Author: Michael Sanford

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 uniqueor 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."

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