Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"Battery-centric web site Battery University explains the real relationship behind battery life and charging. Lithium-ion batteries-the batteries present in most modern smartphones and laptops-don't need to be fully discharged every once in a while to retain battery life, as many of us have been told. In fact, it's quite the opposite..."

Over the years, I'm sure we've all heard a lot of crazy battery advice: don't recharge your phone/laptop/MP3 player until it's completely dead; don't charge it too often; when you're not using it, take out the battery, etc. Much like telling someone they need to defrag their Wi-Fi connection, some of these "tips" just aren't true. This article gives you some important tips about how to maximize the battery life on your portable device.

"Dell today launched the new Latitude line, ushering in a significant refresh of its business systems. The new models have a new streamlined design with the choice of multiple shell colors and take cues both from recent PC designs like the Studio as well as the MacBook Pro; the new systems now have backlit keyboards, a magnesium shell designed to be strong, and an extra-thin design. The mainstream models are the thinnest ever in the mid-size class, the Texas-based company claims, while its ultraportable E4200 model weighs as little as 2.2 pounds. The company also claims to have set a record for battery performance using a combination of proprietary software as well as Intel's Centrino 2 platform. The mid-grade Latitude E6400 with an extended 12-cell battery can last up to 19 hours on a single charge, according to Dell. A standard nine-cell battery also manages 10 hours. The company also promises a revamped power brick that can recover as much as 80 percent of the charge in one hour, and USB ports that will charge phones and other devices even when the system is completely turned off."

I tend not to pay that much attention to Dell's Latitude notebooks because they're usually as ugly as sin, but this new generation looks pretty good. The battery life claims of 19 hours really caught my eye - it seems that Dell is doing this with battery slice technology. Meaning these new notebooks have a power port on the bottom that a thin battery snaps into. This is similar to what HP has done with some of their business-class notebooks, but this technology has yet to make it into any consumer-grade notebook that I can think of. That's a real shame, because as a consumer I really care about battery life - and giving me a big-ass hump battery isn't much of a solution. After the break, there's a video with some Dell staffers talking about the new notebooks and how they compete against the Macbook Air and other ultra-portable laptops. Read more...

All our gizmos and gadgets need power, and for the most part I only get grumpy about power issues when it's time to go away on a business or personal trip. This time, it was our two-week vacation in Japan, and I was extra grumpy about power. Why you might ask? I called Air Canada two weeks before our trip and was informed that the plane we were flying on had no power plugs for laptops in economy class - it seems like every long-haul plane in the world has power except for Air Canada's.

Normally that wouldn't have bothered me because I've been rather fortunate when it comes to laptop power: for nearly two years I used a Fujitsu P7010 laptop, one that I could remove the DVD drive on and insert a second battery to get a solid 10 hours of power. To get even more juice on the go, I tried out a Valence N-Charge that gave me a huge battery boost - can you imagine 20 hours of laptop battery life? I was living the dream. I also had a Proporta laptop battery that gave me less in terms of extended power, but was much more portable. I was completely covered...until I got a new laptop: the Dell XPS M1330.

The M1330 is an impressive laptop, balancing portability with punch - I got mine last September, decked out with the best Dell had to offer: 2.2 Ghz Core 2 Duo processor, 200 GB 7200 hard drive, 4 GB RAM, and the NVIDIA GPU. It's fast, it chugs through RAW photo files like the bad mother that it is, and I'm generally quite pleased with it - until it runs out of power. Sure, I got it with the biggest battery possible (a 9 cell), and I've gotten used to the "hump", but after about four hours, the laptop is dead. Here's where I get frustrated: the Proporta battery, which I was so enthusiastic about when I had a laptop that worked with it, doesn't work with the Dell. At first I thought it was the lack of an adaptor (the M1330 uses this bizarre six-sided plug), but I eventually found one of the plugs that fit - yet even switching the Proporta battery between both voltage modes, it wouldn't power the XPS M1330. Damn. Read more...