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Sony Switching Battery Life Scoring Method, No Longer Advertising Wildly Misleading Numbers
Posted by Gizmodo US Edition at 1:30 PM on September 9, 2008
Sick and tired of never getting even close to the 10 to 12 hours of battery life advertised by PC companies on your laptop? Sony hears you, and is taking pains to improve at least one thing about their power packs. No, not the overheating factor, though they say they've got that somewhat under control now, honest! The company recently told PC Authority that they would be switching to a more realistic measurement for advertising their notebook battery figures. Yay?
Notebook vendors usually base their battery numbers off of Japanese tech association Jeita's method, which measures power depletion when the laptop's completely idle and then averages that number with the laptop's life when running a movie file. Sony will be switching to a Jeita "A" standard, which uses only the movie file test's results. Good news for the hapless consumer, I guess, but I'm pretty sure everyone was hoping for something more like "Hey, your battery will in fact last eleven hours and it won't explode on you either!" [PC Authority]
Comments (AU Comments · US Comments)
There are currently no AU comments for this post.
Leonard Nimrod
Posted 2:18 PM 9/9/08
"...though they say they've got that somewhat under control now, honest!"
That sounds like Intel's making Montevina/Penryn use less power thus creating less heat.
I'm glad someone besides Apple will be using real world usage to determine battery life. I hope this catches on, though I'm surprised it's coming from Sony. These are the people that shipped Rootkit and used a 96kbps bitrate and 3 minute song average to make their digital music players looks more capacious.
Leonard Nimrod
v12spd
Posted 2:11 PM 9/9/08
@snakepliskin: Yeah, I forgot that I was supposed to get that much out of it. Its so effin gorgeous. I was worried the new models would over shadow it with the same design elements but the TZ is still the sexiest.
v12spd
v12spd
Posted 2:07 PM 9/9/08
Yeah with my TZ I get 3-4 hours on high performance and 5-6 out of it with power saver, BUT they sent me a free spare battery after the original clips broke and another free one later so technically I get the advertised life with two batteries.
v12spd
VakeroRokero
Posted 1:59 PM 9/9/08
Sony:
The battery life last between 200-400 web pages views or 25-30 itunes songs. hours are irrelevant for us.
VakeroRokero
snakepliskin
Posted 1:54 PM 9/9/08
Man that vaio is a good looking laptop. Seriously if i had the money i wouldnt even give a crap about battery life id just buy it based on looks.
snakepliskin
Mike918
Posted 1:46 PM 9/9/08
@OMG! Ponies!: 3? i can only hope for 2...but its damn pretty so im ok.
Mike918
OMG! Ponies!
Posted 1:42 PM 9/9/08
Still liking my VAIO. I don't expect more than 3 hours out of a charge anyway.
OMG! Ponies!
Charging_Mooses
Posted 1:38 PM 9/9/08
what a let down... at least they cleaned up thier act somewhat... we need some battery innovation!!!
Charging_Mooses
capitalass
Posted 3:05 PM 9/9/08
I bet Lenovo could get way more than 10-12 hours battery on the x200 with the "Accessibily optimized preload," which is on sale for just $8000 dollars on their $1200 laptop. It must really rock!
I think its actually a linux instant on os like express gate or something, but I thought Linux was free.
[shop.lenovo.com]
capitalass
Benzodiazepine
Posted 4:55 PM 9/9/08
Mine doesn't go further than 3 hours.
Keep making it lasts forever.
Benzodiazepine
Drvec
Posted 7:45 PM 9/9/08
I typically get 5hrs plus with my Vaio, which is in the middle of the specified range. I keep reading reviews for the same model where they complain about getting only 2hrs or less. I guess the numbers vary wildly depending on settings and usage.
Drvec
something_unique_and_descriptive
Posted 1:53 AM 10/9/08
Battery life testing should be running Prime95 on all but one core, while that final core deals with playing a DVD and running HD Tach (if it doesn't have an optical drive then load up all cores). If it's got decent video capabilities then throw 3D Mark in there too. The goal being to measure battery life under absolute maximum consumption... if it can last X hours under that load then it's pretty well guaranteed to last X hours with whatever it is you're doing.
something_unique_and_descriptive
Nick_Bentley
Posted 7:29 PM 10/9/08
Ok, it's marketing pure and simple, cats and kitties. Notebook battery life is the most they can realistically get away with because they have to compete with the numbers the competitors put out, and that's one number that sells product so they stretch it as best they can. There is no real world test they will go with, it's not going to happen. They do it in a lab, with programs that use the least power, so they can claim the most battery life, it's a life you'll never get. They all do this, all of them. Just discount whatever they claim by 25% and that's what you'll get when actually getting work done.
Nick_Bentley