Posts Tagged test
10 hours Battery Life on an Ultrabook. Test and How-To
Posted by Steve Chippy Paine in How To on February 17, 2013
While Ultrabooks generally perform to similar efficiencies under load there’s quite a difference when it comes to near-idle operations and that can seriously impact the length of time you can use an Ultrabook as an offline word processor. As a blogger that’s a very important scenario for me and I suspect that if you’re offline and answering a bunch of emails or writing a presentation or report, this scenario is important to you too. If you choose the right Ultrabook you can get 10 hours of typing on one battery charge.
Sony Vaio T13 Testing Impressions
We’ve got our hands on the Sony VAIO T13 Ultrabook which has so far been quite impressive. In addition to having one of the the most unique designs in the Ultrabook market, the T13 is also one of the cheapest 13″ Ultrabooks you can get your hands on. The build quality is quite impressive and it resumes nearly instantly from sleep. The T13 will soon be launching with a touchscreen and Windows 8 making this a better time than ever to see if it’s worth waiting for.
Acer Aspire S5 Reviewed, Reveals Blazing Fast SSD Speeds
Our pal Avram Piltch of LaptopMag got his hands on Acer’s new Aspire S5 Ultrabook and has an in-depth review available for your perusal. Does the S5 stand up to the competition? LaptopMag rated it 3 stars out of 5, but certainly not because of its record breaking SSD array.
ASUS UX31 Ultrabook First Reviews. Teardown Included!
Posted by Steve Chippy Paine in News on October 17, 2011
Taking a bit longer than I originally expected after the ASUS UX31 availability last week are the first 2 reviews of the ASUS UX31 ‘Zenbook’ Ultrabook. Both reviews originate from Chinese sources.
[UX31 Specifications, Gallery and more information here]
Overall, the initial response seems to be very good. Much better than the first review of the Acer S3 that we saw last week although I am personally disappointed at the use of convertor adaptors to provide VGA and Ethernet. They add weight, take more power than built-in components and are likely to get lost or forgotten. With the case and adaptors added-in, the UX31 weighs a very non-ultrabook 1.8KG.
In both reviews we even get a teardown of the device showing the huge battery area compared to the motherboard. The battery is 50Wh which is a lot more than the 34Wh you get in the Acer S3. As expected, the battery life figures are higher. Battery life ranges from 129 minutes (full-power test) to nearly 7 hours.
Samsung 900X3A Live Review
Posted by Steve Chippy Paine in Review on July 1, 2011
Thanks to everyone that turned up to watch me mess about with the Samsung 900X3A yesterday evening. We spent a good 2 hours going over almost everything except Bluetooth 3+HS and USB 3.0 which we couldn’t test.
Were there any surprises? Not really. We had no issues and found no major showstoppers. The battery was hit hard during the tests though and it does highlight how easy it is to be focusing on working while forgetting that the battery might be suffering. In the 2 hours we tested, we saw 32% battery loss which is about 4hrs total battery time. Considering that we were testing gaming, 1080p YouTube videos and doing CPU and GPU tests, it’s not surprising but it goes to show that there’s quite a range of capabilities.
The other point I noted was that 1080p videos from YouTube played full-screen to a 1080p monitor worked smoothly along with 1080 samples (H.264) at 10 and 12mbps average. In fact, h.264 is handled perfectly by the hardware video decoder. The CPU barely moved!
I’m still writing up the full review of the 900X3A but while you’re waiting, here are three recorded sessions (recorded from the live stream so not the best quality) from last night. The first impressions post (with higher-quality overview video) is here.
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