HP laptop gets 24 hour battery

Author: Gareth Halfacree
Published: 11th September 2008
Comments (5) Stumble
The EliteBook: a snazzy piece of kit, and soon to be capable of a full twenty-four hour runtime.

The EliteBook: a snazzy piece of kit, and soon to be capable of a full twenty-four hour runtime.

It seems only the other day that I was on the Dell homepage and drooling over the promised nineteen hours of battery life available from the new Inspiron units, but time marches on: HP is upping the ante with a laptop capable of a full twenty-four hour runtime.

According to information obtained by BetaNews, HP is due to launch the laptop – an EliteBook 6930p – with a high-capacity battery option capable of running the unit for a full day and night.

This model of EliteBook, first announced this year, uses a variety of neat tricks to keep power consumption at a minimum, including a dinky little 14.1” display that uses energy-efficient LED backlighting and a solid-state drive in place of a traditional mechanical hard disk. These features combined with the new high-capacity battery allow the device to reach those awe-inspiring runtimes. It's also ruggedised to the US Department of Defence 810F standard, so no worries about the TSA being a little ham-fisted with it.

The technology behind the battery is, as yet, unknown – but it's almost certain to be a variant on the popular lithuim-polymer models adorning high-end devices these days.

Sadly, HP have failed to providing pricing information for this day-long marvel – the model of laptop mentioned is available right now starting at $1,899 (£1,094) from HP's website, but the high capacity battery won't be available until next month. If the technology really can offer a full twenty-four hour runtime, I'd imagine that it's going to be expensive. Couple in the fact that the market is experiencing something of a battery shortage at the moment, and it's likely that the add-on will bump up the cost of the laptop considerably.

Would you go for a laptop that can run for an entire day and night, or do you rely on your notebook running out of juice to remind you to stop playing Warcraft and go to bed? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
Quote r4tch3t 11th September 2008, 09:13
I could do with another hour out of my laptop, currently getting 2-3 with standard settings, medium back light. There was no way I was going to shell out $250 for an extra 3 cells in my battery.

I wonder when the battery tech will be available for other manufacturers.
Quote Arkanrais 11th September 2008, 09:40
plug one of these into your gaming laptop and run it for an astounding 30 minutes longer than standard batteries!
Quote Firehed 11th September 2008, 09:56
I'd be more than thrilled to get a solid work day's usage out of a laptop (10-12 hrs for me), but HP could make a laptop that had a battery lasting a month and I still wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole. Their laptops suck. They're just awful. Quite possibly the worst trackpads ever conceived by mankind, never mind the usual crapware preinstalled on them.

But it hardly matters. If I've got my brightness down all the way (I usually do anyways, out of habit), I might be able to get 2.5hrs or so from my current maxed-out MBP. It only gets used in bed now for the most part though, since getting the MacPro. I'd consider one of the ultraportables (netbooks? is what they're called these days I guess...) but (free) wireless isn't nearly ubiquitous enough for one to make sense outside of the house, and I'd much rather sit down to my desktop when at home. For what I do, a full-size notebook doesn't make a bit of sense - it's either too small (coding) or unnecessarily large (browsing, email, etc). I think the ~1024x600 on the 10" mini units is passable, but quite honestly I'd go mad not having textmate even though I hate coding from a laptop and the only osx86 hacks for the mini units breaks wifi without replacing the card, which completely defeats the purpose of having one of those systems in the first place. Blah, I've fallen victim to good software.

What I really wish is that manufacturers would stop putting useless crap for the battery information. Yes, I obviously can translate the unpublished power consumption specs into estimated hours of runtime from "32WHr 4-cell"... (unrelated: how on earth does a dell mini-thing come out $15 cheaper with XP home than ubuntu with the same hardware?). If they're going to publish overinflated numbers they pulled out of thin air, fine, but at least they're vaguely useful.
Quote BentAnat 11th September 2008, 12:24
I read somewhere (possibly el reg), that the indication is subject to a couple of things... effectively (accordin to the article in question), some very specific drivers (assumption is that these have naziesque power saving features built in), specific display, etc... and a secondary battery...
more about that on theReg hardware
Quote paulwebber 17th September 2008, 16:23
erm...just making a small point, would 24hours on a laptop be quite bad for your health? just a thought...surely you would want it to last when u need it to but u dont need 24 hours!! maybe 8? just to last the day and then charged up at night. it really annoys me with this sort of advertising too because its always 'up to 24 hours' thats if you basically turn it on and not use anything on it!! as soon as you use something on it the battery life dives!!
Log in

You are not logged in, please login with your forum account below. If you don't already have an account please register to start contributing.





Stats: 0.172 seconds