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Sony Pledges More Accurate Laptop Battery Figures
Slatterz writes "Ever wondered why you never get the 10 hours of battery life advertised with your new ultraportable? Battery life ratings have been a joke for years, so it's interesting to hear that one big vendor is picking up its game. PC Authority says Sony is abandoning the usual (and wildly misleading) JEITA method for coming up with those 10+ hour battery numbers (they're still using JEITA, but not the usual way). Interestingly, the story has links showing the old and new steps Sony takes to come up with those battery predictions. It's good to see the industry coming clean on this issue."
Just wondering here, how would a move like this affect marketing of computers? The previous model had an up to 10 hour battery life, the new ultra better omgwtfbbq more magnificent version has "Up to 4, but we're not lying to you this time!"
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Somehow I just don't see that faring well with Joe Average
Or at least less figures of recalls and potentially exploding batteries.
Properly, we should be told the capacity of the battery and the consumption of the machine at highest and lowest levels.
For example, my Lenovo X61 gets between 4 and 8 hours on its large battery. The difference comes from how I tune the machine.
At least for laptops using Intel chipsets and Linux, powertop makes it very easy to measure battery life, and (more importantly) tune it. I get my 8 hours by by switching off the wifi, usb ports, killing programs that do too many interrupts, turning down the brightness, etc. Powertop shows exactly how many watts the machine is using. The battery has about 70 watt/hours so when I get it down to 9 watts, that gives me about 8 hours.
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I know this sounds crazy, but the battery is probably the heaviest component in a laptop. If you seriously don't need it, take the damn thing out. Also wasn't there a piece a while back about cordless delivery of power to electronic appliances? Something like that would make batteries all but obsolete.
I have a Sony Vaio UX280 micro pc with an expanded battery, both bought 1.5 years ago. Not only did neither battery live up to their advertised battery life (3 hours standby for the orginal, 9 for the expanded), but now they are closer to 30 min and 45 min. I haven't let them run down to zero and time them, but they fall so fast after unplugging it I get my business done and shut it down. It's to the point now that I need another extended battery, but at $349 I might as well buy an Eee or similar netbook instead. Needless to say (but I'm obviously saying it anyway), if I knew the batteries didn't have the advertised life and were going to die so quickly, I would never have bought them.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
From TFA,
The old testing method: A picture showing a naked man stretching his anus to a large and disproportionate size. The Sony employee reaches into the anus and pulls out the battery figures.
The new method involves running the laptop until the battery is exhausted and timing the result.
Average time before battery goes flat under normal usage: 1 minute more than figures quoted by Dell
Average time before battery goes flat under Vista: 8 hours (i.e. during startup process)
Average time before battery goes flat watching DVD: length of film - 10 minutes
Average time before battery goes flat using Office: Fails during write process of important presentation
Average time before battery explodes into flame: 7 hours 32 minutes
Average time before stored spare battery goes flat: 5 seconds after it was last tested
Average time before battery goes flat under Linux:
Never. It is constantly recharged by sucking energy from the superior mind of the user
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They should start the computer up, leave it unplugged, and run prime 95 or some other resource maximizing program to see it's potential. Then do one that does it at around 50% then idle, etc. And do this and average them, or something of the sort. I do agree with the first comment though, marketing the batteries will be weird unless there is news coverage to the general public about the new method of time calculations.
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built in the 1980s.
It runs for approx 2 weeks continuously, on 4 AA rechargables, and I just dump my notes as a .txt file to my desktop.
If people made a more sophisticated version, with network capability and OpenOffice formatting, I'd buy it like a shot. Modern batteries would also run it for months.....
In Vistttttttttttttta, I only get around tttttttttttttttttten minutttttttttttttes.
Well I always get 10 hours+ of my battery , and I am never cut mid sen..
Cruise TT
Now all we need is for HD manufacturers to stop defining "Gigabyte" as "1 billion bytes", so my 160 GB drive is actually 160 GB (171 billion bytes), and not 149 GB (160 billion bytes).
He who laughs last, thinks slowest.
I find it very hard to imagine Sony doing anything altruistic at all. They are to Hardware what Microsoft is to Software.
So I'm wondering what's in it for them. Do they have some kind of new technology that when measured by the second method only, looks much better for them? Or perhaps their min-power usage number is the same as the movie-play version...
I'm only guessing, but I can't imagine Sony would be doing this just for the benefit of consumers, if they didn't get something out of it, since other manufacturers will still be using the old method of measuring this.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
it would be nice to have a portable computing cluster though. Ten quad cores in your pocket would be a nice performance boost.
Everyone should read that, it's good for most computers running Linux.
I hate DELLs, but they do have cheap replacement batteries. So if your Dell makes it past battery replacement then it's going to be cheap to buy a new one.
Unofficial batteries are often half the price though, or you can refurbish by putting in new Cells in an old enclosure.
So they will give the expected yield of their batteries in kilotonnes now? Right?
Why not just stick to how long the battery lasts during absolute full load? That way you know what your minimum timespan is, the rest is up to you as a user to comphensate for.
I am the lawn!
There would simply be no point in selling laptops with more than 2 days battery life anymore, in 2 days time we'll all be dead anyway (or sucked into a parrallel universe to experience a fate even worse than death!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider
Or alternatively we need RAM manufacturers to stop defining 'gigabyte' as '1,073,741,824 bytes'.
It's not RAM manufacturers, it's the whole computer industry... and for a good reason, that being that computers haven't used decimal arithmetic since COBOL was new and sexy.
Nobody uses 'GiB'. It was a fad, and it's a dead fad. And in any case it should be 'Gio'... the 8-bit-byte is actually LESS of a standard than the 2^30 octet Go.
They'd make laptops that don't die after a year of normal use. I speant about $2K on a Viao AR-260 early last year. It only rarely left my apartment and was never dropped or abused. About 2 months after the 1 year warrenty expres, it just dies. Won't even power on.
Someone save me from this sanity.
1) Take 5 laptops with 5 batteries.
2) Take 5 Stop watches.
I'm going to stop here, because quite frankly, if you haven't figured out where this is going then you're on the wrong website. Maybe this is more your thing?
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
They get different results as they now use different usage settings from Jeita to Jeita A for the measurement- this doesn't mean the old results were wrong, they just made different assumptions. So this new figure may or may not be more accurate for you.
For sure this makes clear, that different usages will yield huge differences in battery time, so in order to get some information about your own situation, you will have to create some statistics on your own with software like Ibam.
Although it's good they changed their measurement standards for the total time, one can only hope, that they will also improve their battery monitoring: Over the time batteries lose capacity and most hardware monitoring fails to adapt to this and gets inaccurate. This is why we see so many systems dropping from "20min" remaining to "0min" remaining in a matter of seconds in the end...
So do their figures represent "how long the battery will last before it runs out of power" or "how long the battery will last before it catches fire" ?
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My Panasonic Let's Note (CF-R5) actually gets the 11 hours it claims on the standard battery (well, down to about 8 or 9 after a couple years of usage, but hey, it'll still last most of a transoceanic flight). Maybe they have more standardized testing methods here in Japan?
Amusing side note: the next model in the same line came with Vista, and only got 8 hours...
On the one hand their competitors will quote the old-style battery lives so SONY will look bad.
On the other, people will be suing them if they don't get every last second of battery life claimed under the new rules
(See, eg., the class-action suits against HD manufacturers for selling Gb instead of GiB...)
Add to this the fact that batteries lose capacity over time (whether you use them or not) and, no, it's not gonna happen.
No sig today...
in 2 days time we'll all be dead anyway
"the first attempt to circulate a beam through the entire LHC is scheduled for 10 September 2008, and the first high-energy collisions are planned to take place after the LHC is officially unveiled, on 21 October 2008."
I guess I have six weeks to work on my tinfoil hat.
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
I've seen several reputable review sites doing the same thing. "We'll charge the battery, sit the system over here doing *ABSOLUTELY NOTHING*, time how long the battery lasts, and report the result as INSANE!!!!!"
http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=4569 (quickest example)
Of course, as soon as you run a DVD Run-Time test, or an actual "real-use" battery test (Like Batterymark or MobileMark) you may see battery times that are an hour better than laptops from 2 years ago. An improvement? Yes. Worthy of words like "INSANE"? Hardly. 10 hours, if I don't touch it, does me ZERO good on a flight, or while waiting in the airport. Why not just put it in standby and report a battery life of "days", or power it off completely and report a battery life of "years". (Either way, it's just as functional, right?)
So, yes, the vendors are mixing up the Kool-Aid (tm) but shame on those in the press who continue to drink it.
Oooh. One of those sweet Japanese net-books from before the net-book.
I got over that strange sense of manga-inspired culture-envy/regret years ago, but I'll tell you, I still get pangs of 'gaijin' when I happen across one of those beauties. That's some serious tech-cred, dude!
-FL
that batteries may quietly become the toner-cartridge of the laptop?
-FL
Uh.. no you can't. Battery voltage is fixed by the chemistry. It happens that laptop batteries use a chemistry that has a relatively constant voltage over the useful portion of the cycle, so amp-hours is a reasonable proxy for joules.
If it's a 5 volt battery, you're not going to get 10 volts out of it without taking it apart and rearranging the cells.
pieterh made the mistake of suggesting the voltage is variable depending on load, and although this is technically true, the kinds of loads that will depress battery voltage noticeably are also likely to damage it.
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It's not RAM manufacturers, it's the whole computer industry...
No, it isn't. Kilo (k) means "multiplied by one thousand", Mega (M) means "multiplied by one million", and so on. The prefix is part of the SI and means the same in every field of science and engineering. It's only (some) software and RAM manufacturers that get it wrong, basically because they decided 1024 was "close enough" to 1000 to be called "kilo", and then the error added up when using bigger values.
Hard disks use the correct factor, and so do network connections, most optical discs, streaming video bitrates, CPU clock speeds, and so on.
If you want to use the 1024 factor, just use ki, Mi, Gi, and so on (personally I preferred the k2, M2, G2 prefixes, but they didn't catch on - I guess the guys at the IEC love saying kibi-mebi-gibi).
If Sony is actually going to change their ratings it's out of fear of a class action lawsuit or the result of a class action lawsuit. In the age of the Bush administration and the GOP's effort to eliminate the FTC, truth in advertising is now only the result of lawsuits.
You would think the GOP would be in favor of more regulation about truth in advertising as it would clearly reduce lawsuits. Instead they want to eliminate truth and lawsuits. The GOP clearly supports quackery.
( Expected Time To Combust )
Why do I give a crap about what kind of arithmetic the COMPUTER uses?
Because the only time it matters whether it's 2^30 bytes or 10^9 bytes is when you're doing something that really truly does matter to the computer.
I can say "oh, somefile.dat is about 3.4 GB".
Which is still useless information, because your file system overhead on that file may be anything from 1% to over 10% depending on the file system. If it's in a bunch of small files, it's even worse... the file system overhead on a directory tree can be half as much again as the files inside it. In general, if you have 90 GB of files, and a 100 GB drive, you can't tell whether the files are going to fit or not... whether the directory listing shows "90000000000 bytes", "90000000 kB", or "90000 MB" or even "90 GB"... and whether those are powers-of-two or powers-of-10 prefixes.
The new battery spec & format spec for batteries with proper ratings is laptop "live". Current batteries will be upgradable to laptop "live" when the 9 laptop live implementors at Pioneer finally pass their certification.
To my mind, calling 1,024 bytes a 'kilobyte' was just about acceptable, since the difference wasn't so great and 'kilo' was a convenient shorthand. But calling 1,073,741,824 bytes a 'gigabyte' is really pushing it,
Why? If you have a 100 GB drive, and you have 90GB of files to put into it, you can't tell whether those files will fit unless you know the file system you're putting them into, how many files you have, how the file sizes are distributed, because the file system overhead on those files can be more than the total sizes of the files put together if they're small enough... and it's not at all unusual for it to be 10-20%. The 7% difference between 10^9 and 2^30 is lost in the noise.
... by installing a rootkit on the test equipment.
My experience is that battery life with any electronic device is dependant upon the amount of usage. Therefore, I don't understand how someone could accurately predict 10 hours without knowing the usage.
It's interesting to note that there is, and has been, an incredible market for batteries that provide significantly longer life. Instead, technology in this area improves in small increments. Anyone who can truly invent the "better battery" would be rich beyond their dreams.
Keep that in mind when you hear people proclaim that science and technology improvements will help us reduce the need for oil. Gauging the market and payoff potential of green and/or alternative energy sources is difficult. An immediate payoff is available for batteries with significantly enhanced life. So far, nothing.