How Wireless Affects Battery Life

Andrew at TabletPCReviewSpot.com has posted an interesting article that will be of interest to mobile warriors. He examines how wireless usage affects power consumption. The article is the first in a series on how the usage of various components of your Tablet PC can affect battery life. Here’s an excerpt:

Whenever we review notebooks one of the questions that always needs to be answered is, what’s the battery life like on this Tablet? We all know manufacturers overstate the quoted battery life for a system, probably because they test for battery life under ideal conditions for getting a high number. For example, wireless off, processor underclocked, system idle, LCD brightness set to low, no DVD and so on. So when your notebook with a quoted 5 hour battery life actually gets three hours, you’re left wondering what happened to those other two hours the manufacturer got?

 

The article contains an number of charts and data and some interesting conclusions. The one I find most interseting is that turning off your wireless doesn’t save that much on battery life. That doesn’t jive with my real world experience, but the logic of their testing makes sense.

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