News - MSI Wind U110 ECO netbook finally surfaces, promises 15+ hours of battery life

[HEXUS]

Intel Poulsbo-based netbook now available in the US for $400.

Read more.

[Scarlet Infidel]

While impressive on paper, I'm not really sure of the point of 15 hour battery life at the moment. I'd rather have 8 hour battery on machine 2-3 times as fast.

[Saracen]

The point is for those that are going to be a long time between a convenient place and time to recharge. Also, quoted times are usually derived from a benchmark process that can be repeated in a controlled fashion to give a consistency between different devices .... but won't necessarily represent what you get in actual usage, which say be more or less.

To me, the benefit of 15 hours would be, for instance, on a long journey, or for use in a conference, when I can't be sure it'll be possible or convenient to recharge. The only people that would buy a machine with exceptionally good battery life will be those for whom that is the most important factor, and speed isn't as important. For me, if it'll run Word and one or two other apps, and let me check email etc, then it's powerful enough, and anything extra that decreases battery life is a negative.

It appears this one may suit me down to the ground, but isn't for you.

[Scarlet Infidel]

The point is for those that are going to be a long time between a convenient place and time to recharge.

Obviously I understand that . I just mean that a full working day of use is probably sufficient for most people (I dont like to work 15 hour days and most developed places have charging points). Obviously more is always better and I look forward to the time when you can take your laptop away for a week and not need to take a charger.

For those interested in very long battery life and not bothered about high performance then ARM smartbooks will probably be the way to go, especially as ARM has announced the Cortex A9 dual core can run at 2GHz (though that particular CPU wont be available for a while yet).