Shootouts

Netbooks Galore: A Tale of Seven 10-inch Netbooks!

By Aloysius Low - 29 Jul 2009

Battery Life and Portability Index

Battery Life and Portability Index

Battery Comparison Table
Battery Specifications/ Notebook Size Capacity
ASUS Eee PC 1008HA 3-cell 32.0Wh
Acer Aspire One AOD250 6-cell 47.5Wh
HP Mini 110 3-cell 28.0Wh
Lenovo IdeaPad S10-2 3-cell 28.0Wh
MSI Wind U123H 6-cell 57.7Wh
Samsung N120 6-cell 66.7Wh
Toshiba NB200 6-cell (Ext. Battery) 63.0Wh

If you're going to be carrying around a netbook, the last thing you'll want is for a netbook to prematurely die on you while you were surfing the internet on the go, so battery life for netbooks is probably one of the more important things to consider when getting a notebook. Again, not all notebooks come with similar sized battery so you'll definitely see differences in battery life. We've tried to ensure that these units come with the default battery configuration, and have mostly succeeded on that account. Only the Toshiba NB200 came with an optional 6-cell battery and not the 3-cell of the default, but you can roughly estimate its battery life to be about slightly half that of the 6-cell performance.

Power consumption figures are generally the same all around, with slight variances expected due to minor differences in hardware set up. The Intel Atom processor generally performs at this level based on our previous experiences, so don't expect to see game changing results until the next generation of Atom processors are finally launched by Intel.

Portability Index

This is where it gets interesting, after all, manufacturers have had time to play around with the form factor, design and build of the netbooks, and depending on the battery life and dimensions of the netbook, our Portability Index benchmark will come up with a figure that indicates how portable a notebook can be. A higher number is eminently desirable, as it shows how much more portable the machine is compared to the others.

The result? Well, the Toshiba NB200 scores pretty well here, thanks to its long lasting battery life and form factor. Note however, that the netbook is using a non-default 6-cell battery option. The ASUS Eee PC 1008HA also does well in this benchmark with its lightweight form factor and decent battery life. Do note however that it's using a non-removable battery so if you run of out juice without a nearby power point, well you're so out of luck.

Interestingly, the ASUS Eee PC 901 still remains the king of the hill in this segment; no other netbooks have yet to come close to beating the 901's scores in this benchmark segment. Of course, this figure should only be compared with other products of it similar build and target user to ensure comparisons are fare. For example, you can't expect a DTR to equal a netbook in the portability index.

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