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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."
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.
No, I was talking about how Joe Average doesn't really care/know that some vendor quotes realistic battery life on the box while another doesn't, they just see a higher number next to the word "hours" on that other computer and buy that one instead of the one who is lying less. I know realistic battery life quotes are great for us geeks, but they must be a marketer's nightmare until this behaviour becomes standardised and mandatory for some reason.
I get you, but I also doubt they would change their marketing much, I imagine instead of saying 10+, the will now say: Up To 10 Hours* As for standardized, the first thought I had when reading the summery was "who is Sony afraid to get sued by that they'd change something in a way that could cost them" Maybe they see the battery life fudging as something that may get cracked down on.
*In sleep mode.
You still have the same problem. Now you're simply moving the problem from calculating "battery life" to calculating "power consumption", and leaving consumers with an extra bit of math to do...
"Lowest" power consumption is tricky, because you've now got to define what parts of the machine have to be functional in this minimal state. ie. You'd get a huge boost in battery life if you shut off the LCD screen, backlight, and graphics chip.
Maximum isn't exactly easy, either... Does this include external devices drawing their power from the laptop ports? USB, Firewire, speakers, mouse, etc., it's pretty easy to drive the power consumption WAY up, with a few ridiculously power-hungry external devices.
Battery capacity is pretty trivial, and is already notated on nearly every battery I've ever seen.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
Unfortunately, whereas I can use my computer without WiFi and USB, etc. I do find it much harder to use it without the screen being on ;-)
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
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's good to see the industry coming clean on this issue."
That should be:
"It's good to see a publication suggest that one player within an industry is slightly tweaking their method of measuring this issue."
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
I will stop calling a Gigabyte = 2^30 when the hard drive manufacturers start calling a byte 10^1 bits.