I promise i’m not really obsessed with battery life and power utilisation on UMPC’s but ever since I made predictions I’ve been interested to see how close i’ve been.
Today, it appears I missed the mark with my predictions on battery life while watching films. Not just by a little bit, but by a whole hour! Ctitanic posted the results of his film duration test in his blog and he says that he only got 1:25 with wifi off, BT off, 50% brightness and playing from Flash disk.
This is even worse than the rather dissapointing result of 2hrs that came from a Japanese report.
I mentioned it to VIA a few weeks back and I was told that to extend the battery life and get the most advantage out of the VIA’s unichrome video chipset while watching a film, you need to use a player that is optimised for the VIA platform. WinDVD and PowerDVD are two examples. If you’re running linux already (anyone?) then there’s a VIA-supported and optimised version of Xine available.
It remains to be seen what the advantage of these programs will be but i’m a bit sceptical now that we’re going to reach 2.5 hours for a film. It also calls into question the rest of the battery life predictions. I’ll be watching closely for more test results. specifically, these tests:
- Watching a film with screen off (!) and calculating the screen power drain.
- Battery capacity testing (do the batteries need conditioning?)
- Checking cpu utilisation during fim watching with and without a VIA-optimised video player.
If anyone can, is planning or has run these tests, let me know and we’ll see if we can work out the best ultra mobile PC setup for video watching and some final real-world battery life results. Or maybe I should just ignore battery life altogether as the ‘low battery’ warning has just popped up on my laptop here. Its a sign!
Regards
Steve / Chippy.
