John at Eee-PC reviews the new edition of MSI’s Wind netbook, and finds that it runs for more than a day without recharging.
The 9-cell battery has the MSI Wind U115 hybrid is coasting as much as 25:04:16 hours kept running!
John’s putting it through a wider battery of tests right now.
U115 MSI wind with 9 cell battery at idle: 25:04 hours![Eee-PCvia Lilliputing]
This kind of reminds me of the games amplifier manufacturers and salespeople would play with power ratings.
They would tell you that it’s 100 watts per channel, but not tell you that is at 90% distortion, peak-to-peak and only at 1,730 Hz into 60 ohms.
Finally the industry got together an came up with some qualifiers that had to be published with the power spec, would make it more meaningful, like this:
“100 watts X 4 RMS all channels driven continuously into 4 ohms with less than 0.1%THD from 20Hz to 20kHz”
Is there or should there be a similar system for battery lifetimes?
It would be awfully hard to create such a system, considering the different kinds of batteries available, and how different systems draw on them at different rates. Hard to find a usable metric to compare them all on.
I’m reminded of game console manufacturers – specious claims saying things like “The PlayStation 2′s Graphics Synthesizer is capable of processing 75 million polygons per second.”, but not mentioning that those polygons are all in grayscale, not moving, and that none of the many necessary passes (bumpmapping, etc.) were being run. Claims without context are meaningless and intentionally misguiding. See Monster Cable for more examples.
Even if it only gets half of that under real usage, this is pretty impressive.