Laptops move towards all-day battery life

Business travellers expect a lot from their laptop but a trio of tightly-connected features tops the list. The ideal notebook should be thin, it should be light and it should have enough battery life to last a whole day and then some.

The first two traits naturally go together and they’re ideal for maximising space in your carry-on bag as well as taking from one client meeting to the next meeting.

And being able to use the laptop at your airline’s departure lounge, during an international flight and still being able to do a quick email session at the airport while waiting for your bags to hit the carousel? That seals the deal.

So when will you be able to get a laptop that’s made for the long haul? When can you hit the road but leave the AC adapter at home?

The answer to that question is ‘today’, depending on the price you’re prepared to pay and sometimes the compromises you’re willing to make. Some netbooks easily strut past the 10 hour mark but they lack the muscle, features and capabilities of a fully-fledged laptop.

In some cases you can add a secondary battery which replaces the notebook’s CD/DVD drive or attaches to the notebook’s underside (this type of Acer aspire 5920 battery is sometimes called a ‘travel slice’) so you can hit the road with two full tanks of juice – although this adds to the laptop’s bulk.

But within the next few years that won’t even be an issue. The ever-onwards march of technology in computer chips and other components will make ‘all day computing’ a trait of almost every laptop.

“The challenge for us is to bring all day battery life to the mainstream so that you take the laptop to work and leave the power supply at home” says Mooly Eden, general manager of Intel’s Mobile Platforms group.

“But ‘all day’ means different things to different people” Eden tells Australian Business Traveller. “For me it might be eight hours, for you it might be ten hours. And we need to do even more than that, because as the laptop gets older the battery life will slowly get lower.”

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Intel’s Mooly Eden showcases a next-gen concept notebook that’s wafer-thin, waif-light but can put in a solid day’s work before you reach for the battery charger.

Making notebooks better is part of Eden’s technical DNA. Through his revolutionary work creating Intel’s Centrino laptop technology, which in turn laid the foundations for today’s entire Core line of processors, the highly animated Israeli-American engineer and self-confessed ‘chip-head’ is widely considered to be the father of modern mobile computing.

And Eden’s goal for Intel? “We need to deliver 10-12 hours without the charger. And we will be able to do that, because all day battery life is not just possible, it is inevitable.”

The foundations are already in place. Intel’s family of Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 chips perform the neat trick of running faster than any previous generation of Intel silicon while drawing less power from the battery.

And even that dollop of extra speed is being channeled into eking out extra battery life. If you divide the laptop’s typical working day into tiny slices of time, most of that day is spent in varying states of idle rather than being actively used.

More processing muscle means the notebook can do the heavy-lifting faster so that it more quickly returns to the low-power idle state – and the more time it spends there, the longer the battery lasts.

Eden calls this feature “hurry up and get idle”, and it’s enhanced by ‘turbo boost’ modes which further accelerate the processor for short but intense bursts.

These can be everyday tasks like opening an email attachment or previewing a PowerPoint deck as a set of thumbnails. Tasks that take six seconds suddenly take three or four: but it’s less about speed than sleep.

“The idea is wake the notebook up, do the job and then go to sleep again” Eden explains. “If the chip does the job faster it can go back to sleep sooner, so you get better performance and you also get extended laptop battery life. This is the real secret of energy efficiency.”