Battle for autonomy on the realm of netbooks

For me, the first reason for choosing a netbook is portability. Portability that consists of several different parts: weight, size and battery life. All these three are closely tied together, as there’s no reason to have a small and light device you can easily carry around if it provides only a couple of hours in autonomy, as there’s also no reason for having 10+ hours battery life in a 7 pounds brick it will always break your back when transported.

Thus, while size and weight remained somehow stable during the last year, producers tried to catch our attention with stellar autonomy. All the latest PineTrail device equipped with 6 Cell batteries offer at least 11 hours of life. But be careful, these are “on paper” figures. What does this mean? Well, producers get these numbers with screen brightness set to minimum, Wi-fi or Bluetooth OFF and nearly no activity on the computer. Thus, in real life usage, you’ll see that none of the devices can offer the battery life claimed in the specs. And unfortunately many customers don’t know this “little trick” producers use to catch attention.

So, how can on paper autonomy be trasnlated in real-life performance? This little list bellow should help you:

• an Asus 1005PE-P with claimed battery life of 14 hours will run for between 10 to 11 hours
• an Asus 1005PE-P or 1001P, with claimed battery life or 11 hours, will run for between 7 and 8.5 hours
• a Toshiba NB305 or an Acer Ao532h with claimed battery life of 11 hours will go for between 7 to 8 hours
• an Ion powered device will run for around 3-4 hours on a 6 Cell battery
• a CULV powered netbook with claimed battery life of 8-9 hours will go for around 5 or 6

And numbers may vary from netbook to netbook, but generally, you should expect real life autonomy to be 20 to 30% below claimed levels.

Still, at this rates, netbooks are the best laptops in terms of battery life and autonomy on most of them is more than enough for a regular work day.

Tags: battery life, good autonomy