Sony Pledges More Accurate Laptop Battery Figures 185
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."
Next can we work on longevity? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How is this for marketing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How is this for marketing? (Score:4, Insightful)
*In sleep mode.
Re:Battery capacity, not life (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
HD manufacturers next? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Battery capacity, not life (Score:5, Insightful)
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 ;-)
What's in it for Sony ?... (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:HD manufacturers next? (Score:5, Insightful)
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'?
Re:HD manufacturers next? (Score:1, Insightful)
sorry, but SI units define the prefix giga as 1 billion, not 1.073... billion.
Re:How is this for marketing? (Score:3, Insightful)
"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."
Re:Gibibyte is dead. (Score:1, Insightful)
I will stop calling a Gigabyte = 2^30 when the hard drive manufacturers start calling a byte 10^1 bits.