Business travellers expect a lot from their laptop but a trio of tightly connected features tops the list. The ideal notebook should be thin, it should be light and it should have enough battery life to last a whole day and then some.
So when will you be able to get a laptop that’s made for the long haul? When can you hit the road but leave the laptop AC adaptor at home?
The answer to that question is today, depending on the price you’re prepared to pay and sometimes the compromises you’re willing to make. Some netbooks easily strut past the 10-hour mark but they lack the muscle, features and capabilities of a fully fledged laptop.
But within the next few years that won’t even be an issue. The ever-onwards march of technology in computer chips and other components will make ‘all day computing’ a trait of almost every laptop.
“The challenge for us is to bring all-day battery life to the mainstream so that you take the laptop to work and leave the power supply at home,” says Mooly Eden, general manager of Intel’s Mobile Platforms group.
“But ‘all day’ means different things to different people,” Eden tells Dynamic Business. “For me it might be eight hours, for you it might be 10 hours. And we need to do even more than that, because as the laptop gets older the battery life will slowly get lower.”
The foundations are already in place. Intel’s family of Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 chips perform the neat trick of running faster than any previous generation of Intel silicon while drawing less power from the HP HU090AA battery. And even that dollop of extra speed is being channelled into eking out extra battery life.
If you divide the laptop’s typical working day into tiny slices of time, most of that day is spent in varying states of idle rather than being actively used. More processing muscle means the notebook can do the heavy lifting faster so that it more quickly returns to the low-power idle state – and the more time it spends there, the longer the laptop battery lasts.
Eden calls this feature “hurry up and get idle”, and it’s enhanced by ‘turbo boost’ modes which further accelerate the processor for short but intense bursts. These can be everyday tasks like opening an email attachment or previewing a PowerPoint deck as a set of thumbnails. Tasks that take six seconds suddenly take three or four: but it’s less about speed than sleep.
There’s also a growing trend towards lightweight operating systems which let you dive into email, browse the web and play music or movies without loading Microsoft Windows. Typically based on the Linux operating system and embedded into a flash memory chip inside the laptop, these ‘instant on’ systems spring to life within seconds instead of the hard disk-hammering (and power sucking) minute that Windows often demands – making them a boon for short work sessions on the go.
Those are some of the technologies now converging into the next generation of notebooks. Give us a few years, the experts say, and almost every laptop will be built for the long haul.