Lenovo's ThinkPad Tablet: An Android Business Slate
Battery Life Testing
A Note From Lenovo On Battery Life:
When rating battery life, Lenovo says you should get up to five days of use from the ThinkPad tablet in suspend mode and up to 10 hours in idle mode. Lenovo expects up to nine hours of battery life while browsing the web over Wi-Fi and up to eight hours of battery life with 3G browsing and video playback. To further clarify these numbers, Lenovo explained that the ThinkPad tablet is in idle state when you let it sit and the screen automatically turns off according to the preset system timer. Suspend mode can be achieved by pressing the power button and putting the system into a deep sleep. It's important to note that suspend mode is different from pressing and holding the power button to turn the tablet completely off.
With other tablets we've tested, we haven't noticed a significant difference in battery life when the tablet was in suspend mode versus idle mode. As you can see from the battery ratings listed here, Lenovo says there is a big difference in longevity with the ThinkPad tablet (five days in suspend mode versus 10 hours in idle mode). Indeed, we experienced much shorter battery life on the ThinkPad tablet when we let the system put itself into idle mode. Using a tablet, it's not uncommon for us to let the tablet put itself to sleep. When we did this with the ThinkPad tablet, it also wasn't uncommon for us to pick up the tablet the next day and find that that battery had drained completely.
 |
|
To quantify the ThinkPad tablet's battery life, we ran our standard web browsing test. In this test, we set up a webpage with a mix of graphics and text. The page automatically refreshed itself every three minutes. We set the ThinkPad tablet's display to 50% brightness. For this test, the ThinkPad tablet managed to last six hours and 25 minutes before it died. Here's a look at how the ThinkPad tablet compares to other tablets using this same test:
The Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet lasted about 7 hours in total in our web-based test. Not bad at all. Lenovo's tablet wasn't in the lead of the pack but a little over 7 hours is solid performance in this very typical real-world usage model.
