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Sony Pledges More Accurate Laptop Battery Figures

Posted by timothy on from the trust-but-verify dept.

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."

13 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. How is this for marketing? by Swizec · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!"

    Somehow I just don't see that faring well with Joe Average ...

    1. Re:How is this for marketing? by Swizec · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:How is this for marketing? by dotancohen · · Score: 5, Funny

      Or until a lot of people and magazines wonder why the hell they lie to us, since we can never reach the battery time stated on the box. Like now.

      What are you talking about? My battery always lasts at lea

      --
      It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
    3. Re:How is this for marketing? by dotancohen · · Score: 5, Funny

      You can tell whether or not your mac hibernated easily. If it wakes up instantly on a key press it was sleeping. If it needs the power plugged in, and comes back to a greyscale filtered version of what you were working on and a progress bar, then it was hibernating.

      What state was mine in? I pushed the button and it said "BRAAAAAIIIINS!!!"

      --
      It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
  2. Battery capacity, not life by pieterh · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    My blog
  3. Next can we work on longevity? by oodaloop · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  4. Battery testing methods by sakdoctor · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  5. New Sony Figures by clickety6 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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

    --
    ----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
  6. HD manufacturers next? by jeroen94704 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:HD manufacturers next? by meringuoid · · Score: 5, Insightful
      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).

      Or alternatively we need RAM manufacturers to stop defining 'gigabyte' as '1,073,741,824 bytes'. If they must insist on using a power of 1,024, then they can pick a different word for it, that doesn't conflict with the usage of the 'giga' prefix to mean 'x10^9' in every other field in the world. May I suggest 'gibibyte'?

      --
      Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
    2. Re:HD manufacturers next? by asc99c · · Score: 5, Informative

      Hard disc manufacturers are in the right though - mega means million, giga means billion, tera means trillion. It's the world of computers with their binary-derived values that are wrong.

      This has already been discussed in great detail, and the decision was that a binary gigabyte (2^30 bytes instead of the decimal 10^9) should be called a gibibyte (GiB).

      2^10 bytes (1024) is a Kibibyte (KiB)
      2^20 bytes is a Mibibyte (MiB)
      2^40 bytes is a Tibibyte (TiB)

      There are even a few people who took notice of the decision and switched usage.

  7. no lying? by rarel · · Score: 5, Funny

    So they will give the expected yield of their batteries in kilotonnes now? Right?

  8. Repent for September 10th is nigh! by Candid88 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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