Lenovo ThinkPad Edge Review
Power Consumption and Battery Life
It's no secret that our battery life figures are generally less than those claimed by the PC maker. We've found that most published battery life figures are based around "ideal" conditions, which generally means that the screen is dimly lit, Wi-Fi is switched off and no real intensive tasks are done during the duration of the test. We use Battery Eater Pro, an application that taxes the system for the duration of the test to mimic heavy real-world usage. We had the screen brightness locked at 60%, Wi-Fi switched on and all other applications closed.
The ThinkPad Edge doesn't quite live up to the lofty claims by Lenovo in terms of battery life, but it's really close. Closer than most machines are, that's for sure. We were incredibly impressed with the 4.25 hour figure that we saw in testing, though we should make clear that this was with the optional 6-cell battery and not the standard 4-cell. If you're planning on using this machine on the road often, we would highly recommend springing for the larger battery. It produces a small bulge on the underside that actually provides ventilation when it's sitting on a table. This is far superior, in our minds, than carrying around a second 4-cell battery.
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What's amazing is that this ultraportable can last longer than some netbooks we tested, and if you really crank the brightness down and flip off the Wi-Fi (such as when you're in flight), you could probably squeeze six hours out of the machine on a single charge. For all but the most avid of travelers, that's plenty of time, and it's really raising the bar in terms of battery life for machines of this form factor. Kudos to Lenovo for providing a capable machine with great battery life; those two come together far too infrequently in the notebook sector these days.
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What's amazing is that this ultraportable can last longer than some netbooks we tested, and if you really crank the brightness down and flip off the Wi-Fi (such as when you're in flight), you could probably squeeze six hours out of the machine on a single charge. For all but the most avid of travelers, that's plenty of time, and it's really raising the bar in terms of battery life for machines of this form factor. Kudos to Lenovo for providing a capable machine with great battery life; those two come together far too infrequently in the notebook sector these days.
