Archive for the ‘battery’ Category

I apologise for my possibly over-extended coverage of the Samsung NC10 battery life. This will be the last post on the matter I promise.

As we’ve seen in previous Laptop Magazine tests and my brief hands-on last Saturday, the NC10 turns in some impressive battery drain figures.

Laptop Magazine have taken the testing a step further and pushed the NC10 to the absolute limit by dropping in an SSD and disabling the BT radio on their web browsing tests. The result…nearly 8 hours of surfing at minimum brightness.

While this may not be the best of real-life tests, it shows that the underpinnings are efficient and that’s exactly what you need on a mobile device.

The NC10 shouldn’t just be crowned the best netbook out there, it should be crowned the best consumer laptop out there. 10" and an Atom 1.6Ghz is good enough for 9/10 consumers so expect it to eat well into 12 and even 15.4" low-end laptop sales.

All the NC10 details and links to reports in the NC10 reference page.

I’ve already posted about this, twice. Samsung have some great engineers.

I had the chance to look at an NC10 (#1 device on the portal right now) at the netbook meeting in Cologne on Saturday and the first thing I did was to measure the minimum drain of the device. Within minutes, I was seeing a fantastic sub-5W minimum drain.

This is lower than on most UMPCs and is a good indication that the electronics on the motherboard, the power components and the screen are well engineered. There’s no point putting in a low-power CPU if you’re going to lose the advantage it with crappy engineering. Take the Kohjinsha SC3. It uses the latest, lower clock, lower power CPU and chipset and yet even after hours of optimising, the base drain on it is no less than 7.5W. That’s 50% more than the, much bigger NC10 that doesn’t even use the low power CPU and chipset.

Battery life outweighs most requirements for me so considering that everything else on the device is up to scratch, I’m seriously thinking of getting a black NC10 as my only laptop and selling the M912 and Medion Akoya. They’re both excelent devices but neither of them are as well engineered as the NC10

Samsung NC10 links and specs in the product pages.

I recall seeing this solution a while back on JKKMobile but Paul from MoDaCo has now got one for testing. Its a 47Wh battery pack for the HTC Shift from Mugen which should allow about 5hrs online time thus solving one of the HTC Shift’s biggest problems. It’s a tidy solution but at nearly $240, it’s a huge amount to pay for 5 hrs of computing time.

Paul is doing further testing and will report back on performance soon.

Kevin C. Tofel over at JKotR has spent some time benchmarking the 6-cell extended battery for the MSI Wind. I have to say, I’m really impressed. Using BatteryEater, Kevin was getting 3 hours and 39 minutes running the minimum runtime test, which uses the CPU at 100% capacity until the battery dies. Running the test a 50% screen brightness, Wi-Fi on, and no Windows power management, it is easy to how a regular work load could give you nearly 5 hours of runtime. Kevin also ran BatteryEater after toggling the Wind’s ‘Turbo’ button, which cuts the CPU speed in half. Running at 800MHz, the Wind went for an impressive 4 hours and 59 minutes under full CPU strain. Kevin says that with regular usage and power management, you could hit 7 hours with the extended battery. Head over to JKotR to see the full article including a comparison to the Asus Eee 1000H.

I’m going camping over the next four days. Here’s the kit that’s going to keep me productive.

[The Wife and little-one have planned a last-minute camping trip together and I was due to stay home and work but I've decided to go along and make a working holiday of it. Dads - this is the beauty of Ultra Mobile PC's!!!]

That’s a Samsung Q1 Ultra being charged from a Tablet Kiosk MP3400 which will be charged using a Sunlinq 25W solar panel. Also included are the Nokia N82 and a battery charging set. More details here.

Check out Solar-UMPC for some more mobile and solar-computing posts over the next few days.

A clear message to UMPC OEM’s

If it wasn’t clear before, it is now. [If the results are not showing, make your vote and you'll see them.]

While some people will accept 3-hours battery life for an Ultra Mobile PC, 85% of people want 4 or more hours. 50% of people here see 5 hours as minimum battery life for a UMPC.

As you might have read, I have been very disappointed with the battery life figures on the Kohjinsha SC3. I was expecting a lot lot more from an Ultra Mobile PC built on Intel’s latest battery-optimised Menlow platform but it turns out that under normal use, this device is just as bad as many devices based on the previous platform. Over the last 24 hours I’ve spent a lot of time trying to analyse why and have finally come up with the reason. Invetec, the OED for this device, have cut corners. While the background drain (on the motherboard and power board) is better than on previous Kohjinsha’s, it’s no better than the HTC Shift, Q1 Ultra. All these devices can match the SC3 for background efficiency. About 4W minimum or 5-hours, is what you can expect with everything turned off but the processor.

OK, 4W is good but once the screen is on, boom! Up goes the battery drain by between 80 and 150%. This is exceptionally high drain for what appears to be a LED-backlit screen. Thank goodness that using the screen in a bright room requires only 3/8th brightness but it’s still about 3W of drain which is much higher than it should be.

The second shock comes when you turn the VIA, yes VIA!,  USB Wifi module on. Connecting to a hotspot will push the drain up by over 3W. It will settle back to 2W after connection but this is, quite frankly, pathetic. A wifi module that takes more power than the processor is a joke. There are far more efficient Wifi modules out there. Did Inventec think they were designing a cheap netbook?

So from a background drain of 5W, if you want to surf the net in a bright room over Wifi, the battery life drops to a depressing 2hrs. This is an average drain of 10W which is no better than the devices mentioned above.

Breakdown, tips and summary follow…

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Author: Hanno Zulla
Original article appears on Hanno’s blog. Reprinted in full with permission.

When it comes to portable electronic gadgets, there are three major annoyances.

The three hour limit must fall

Photo by AndyArmstrong

There is an unwritten rule when designing portable computers:

The battery will last three hours.

Once technological advances allow the next generation to run longer - be it thanks to more efficient hardware or more powerful battery technology - the manufacturers decide to shrink the battery, capping the device back to the three hour limit.

Three is a nice psychological figure. “Lasts three hours? - not too short!” “Less than three kilogramms? - not too heavy!” After all these years, today’s 3 kg laptops usually still run for 3 hours or less.

This must end.

Three hours is not enough for a true mobile device (especially since the advertised three hours of battery time usually result to less than two in real use).

Read on for more….

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