Discussions

When the first portable cell phones emerged, they needed a battery as big as a suitcase if you wanted more than half an hour of conversation time. Fortunately technology evolved and this isn’t the case anymore (my cheapo Samsung cell phone can last as long as five days between recharges). And hopefully laptop computers are going in the same direction.

The goal of the R&D department at Intel is to develop a regular-sized notebook with a battery lasting at least eight hours using the laptop at its full capacity. This “magic number” comes from the fact that eight hours is the average time a person works per day. Of course the more autonomy we can get the better.

Some people believe that in order to have a laptop with a longer battery life you need to add a heavier and bulkier battery. Fortunately this isn’t always the case. Of course the development of new battery technologies will probably solve the problem, but reducing power consumption will surely help as much as inventing a new battery technology.

Consider Pentium M (a.k.a. Centrino platform). Since its introduction laptops with batteries lasting four hours became a reality. But in order to achieve that you can’t play DVDs, you have to reduce the screen brightness, configure it to shut down after one minute of inactivity, put the CPU to run at a lower clock rate, etc.

So you can get a longer battery life to choosing the right components (i.e. components that consume less) and configuring your laptop correctly.

But we want more. We want to run the laptop at its full capacity. According to Intel the battery life of a current laptop based on Centrino 2 technology lasts only 140 minutes (two hours and twenty minutes) when playing Blu-Ray movies. This shows how there is still a long way down the road to achieve the eight-hour mark.

I’d be happy if I could have a battery lasting enough to watch at least two full feature films. My reasoning is based on my plane trips. Plane trips with two hours or less aren’t boring, but if you take a coast-to-coast direct flight from Los Angeles to New York or Miami during the day you’ll learn or rediscover the true concept of boring. Being able to watch at least two movies would certainly help me to make the trip less boring. And it should be Blu-Ray, of course, as it is the most modern technology available. By the way, if you also think a Coast-to-Coast plane trip boring, I won’t even talk about my trips to Taiwan or mainland China.

Adding a battery that is bigger and heavier is out of question for me. As I mentioned before, I use my laptop to cover trade shows, so I need it to be light, otherwise by the end of the day my back and shoulders are like if I carried a bag full of stones all day long. Buying an extra battery? I really never even thought about this possibility. More stones in my backpack? No way. Even though this can be a solution for people that have to work on the run for sure (for example, if I were a salesperson driving around, then my reasoning would be different and even bigger and heavier or extra batteries would probably solve my problem).

Currently what I do during flights is to configure my laptop to consume less, watch only one movie, play very old games like Tetris or Mah Jong and pray for the battery to die as close to my destination as possible.