My personal lower limit for battery life on a mobile device is three hours. When I tested the OQO and got just 2hrs, I was disappointed. Since then I’ve been doing some cleaning, tweaking and testing and I’m now able to give you my results.

The OQO 2+ can reach just under 3hrs of constant online action after tweaks. The tweaks I’ve done are not difficult and most people will be familiar with them. Number 1 tweak is to run the device in power saving battery mode. The CPU is locked to 800mhz in this mode but Vista is still surprisingly usable, probably due to the fast ssd and hyperthreading that you don’t get in 800mhz Atom CPUs. The second tweak is to drop the backlight to about 50%. The brightness at this level is enough for a daylight room. The third tweak is to set the fan settings to ‘quiet’. By doing this you reduce the amount of time that the fan is on although there is a school of thought that says it would be better to keep the components cool so maybe this one need more testing.

There are other tweaks that could be performed too but I haven’t got into those yet but for the meantie, its looking acceptable. Not good, just acceptable. Considering the speed of standby on this device and the tiny size of the spare batteries, I think OQO have made the right trade-offs with size, weight and battery life and the really wonderful thing is that if you need it, you can dial a lot of power in leaving the choice to the end user. Desktop power or mobile battery life all-in-one.

(Note. 3hrs is the maximum figure. Careless use of heavy flash-based web pages can reduce this figure quickly down to 2.5hrs or less. Imm also doing test to see just how power efficient the OLED screen is.)