It is possible to feel confident that you’ll last the day without your charger. I experienced it for the first time with Haswell and with the Fujitsu S904 it’s possible you could even do a two-day + hotel stretch without a charger. It’s not an Ultrabook because of the battery bump but at only 1.5KG it’s probably got the biggest battery / weight ratio of any laptop or Ultrabook.
Testing power usage on Haswell Ultrabooks is difficult due to the huge range of scenarios that the next generation Ultrabooks have. They’ll stream music for days and yet if you try to do too much gaming on them, you might be out of juice in as little as two hours. What we can say though, without a shadow of a doubt, is that the battery life on Haswell Ultrabooks, compared to Ivy Bridge Ultrabooks is hugely improved. We’ve got a Dell XPS 12 with Haswell here that proves it.
There isn’t a manufacturer out there what will tell you how long that sealed-in battery will last and you’ll be lucky to get any idea of replacement cost, or even possibility, before you buy that product.
I’ve got an Ultrabook here that is reporting a warning that the battery needs replacement after just 18 months. On another, that I’ve been using for well over a year, the wear level is just 14%. In this article you’ll find out why Ultrabooks have sealed batteries, how to check your battery health, tips for prolonging the life of your battery and some examples of Ultrabooks with removable batteries.
Sure, we can all get an Ultrabook to run for 10hrs. I did it myself recently when I put a Samsung through a typing test but how about being online and running web apps? Running the web through a browser is one of the most taxing things you can do to a laptop so seeing 9.5hrs runtime in a MobileMark2012 test is something worth checking out, in 60 seconds with a timelapse video. Haswell is doing the business.
We’ve already heard that all Ultrabooks based on 4th-Gen Core (Haswell) will have to have WiDi capability and touchscreens but PCWorld have just published some more details from Intel.
Here’s a way to check for battery capacity on a Windows 10 laptop, and to view historical battery life reports. without installing any 3rd party apps. It’s built right into Windows 10 and it takes just a minute to get the battery information. If you’re thinking about buying a second-hand laptop, this is one of the commands you need to use before you buy!
While Ultrabooks generally perform to similar efficiencies under load there’s quite a difference when it comes to near-idle operations and that can seriously impact the length of time you can use an Ultrabook as an offline word processor. As a blogger that’s a very important scenario for me and I suspect that if you’re offline and answering a bunch of emails or writing a presentation or report, this scenario is important to you too. If you choose the right Ultrabook you can get 10 hours of typing on one battery charge.
Sharp’s press conference has just finished at CES 2013 and within it was one of the important technologies of 2013 when it comes to mobile devices and power consumption. IGZO.
As CPU, GPU and comms power requirements fall, the screen becomes a very big, power-hungry issue. IGZO screen technology could really help extend in-use battery life and that’s why we’re watching it closely.