Linda and myself must have a thought-line between us. She published Q1b vs Q1P battery life test results on the same day as me!
Battery Life: an amazing 4 hours and 16 minutes in always on mode, wireless on, no standby, no hibernate and the screen and hard drive on. Which is close to double the battery life of the Q1.
Keep in mind that you should get another 1 or more hours of of battery life if you were to use “Max Battery Life” mode from the pre set in the Samsung battery manager.
Linda didn’t say what she was actually doing on the Q1b at the time but I suspect it was a fairly quiescent state. Probably with the screen turned down below 50%. Certainly a DivX video will play for four hours and I dare say you could type for four hours but browsing is getting to be quite a processor intensive activity these days so you won’t get that life if you’re using it as a web tablet. As an audio player with an extended battery you could even stretch to 10 hours (good for a party perhaps!) but again, its not a common usage scenario. When you get into common usage, the gap between Intel and VIA closes up a little. Having said that, my Q1b with built-in HSDPA is turning out to be a real gem of a device. I will try and install the HID drivers on it today (which work very nicely on the Q1P – thanks Ctitanic.) The only issue is an incompatibility between the Q1B right-hand USB port and the keyboard from the organiser pack. It doesn’t recognise the keyboard unless you put a passive USB hub inline.
At under $799 from one or two retailers in the US, the Q1b represents damn good value and when bought with the organiser pack, would be my recommendation for anyone looking for a sub-$1000 ultra mobile PC or portable PC/keyboard combo. It also make a killer long-haul entertainment platform. The picture on the right shows the Q1b with the extended battery, original battery pack and a 56w/hr battery pack. The total weight of 1.5KG, less than most ‘lightweight’ notebooks, gives you 20 hours of quality video playback! The Q1P+ Organiser pack in desktop-mode is shown in the background.
Lindas comparison is here at TabletPC2. Q1b specs and links here.
