Asus Ion 2-Powered Eee PC 1201PN Review
Battery Performance
In
the past, we've had some ups and downs with regard to Asus battery life
claims. But while we were impressed with how close the Eee PC 1201N came to meeting Asus' expectations of around 5 hours of maximum life, we're a little underwhelmed here. Asus claims that you can get up to 7 hours of battery life on the 1201PN, largely thanks to the new Atom N450 in use rather than the Atom 330 found in the previous generation 1201N model.
Click To Enlarge
We were able to squeeze out just under four hours in our real-world BatteryEater Pro test, which runs a graphical application in the background to simulate average desktop use and Web surfing while having the brightness set at 60%.
That's nowhere near 7 hours. Of course, if you cranked the brightness way down and barely used your machine at all, you may get it to stay alive for 7 hours, but in real-world use, expect a lot closer to 3-4 hours. Had we ran any serious multi-media, the score would've certainly stooped closer to 3 hours on a full charge. The benefit is that there's no "battery bulge" with the included 6-cell, but an extended 9-cell for even longer use may interest some. Also, note we score another 35 minutes of battery life above and beyond the previous generation Asus 1201N. Not too shabby actually but we were looking for a bit more..
;)
Click To Enlarge
We were able to squeeze out just under four hours in our real-world BatteryEater Pro test, which runs a graphical application in the background to simulate average desktop use and Web surfing while having the brightness set at 60%.
That's nowhere near 7 hours. Of course, if you cranked the brightness way down and barely used your machine at all, you may get it to stay alive for 7 hours, but in real-world use, expect a lot closer to 3-4 hours. Had we ran any serious multi-media, the score would've certainly stooped closer to 3 hours on a full charge. The benefit is that there's no "battery bulge" with the included 6-cell, but an extended 9-cell for even longer use may interest some. Also, note we score another 35 minutes of battery life above and beyond the previous generation Asus 1201N. Not too shabby actually but we were looking for a bit more..
