At CES, HP went on about how proud they are of their 24-hour battery life claim against Dell. Well, at Dell we take a slightly different approach – create business laptops with the entire user experience in mind.
Dell commissioned a study from Principled Technologies that compared a Dell Latitude E6400, Lenovo ThinkPad T400 and HP EliteBook 6930p on multiple dimensions. Here are some of the findings:
- After an hour of charge time the Latitude E6400 was 83 percent charged versus 66 percent for both the Lenovo and HP system. This means you get an extra 54 minutes of battery life (on a typical six-cell battery) using Dell's Express Charge for one hour. That is pretty valuable when trying to charge your battery while waiting to board a flight.
- In one hour a person could upgrade the RAM, hard drive and add a mobile broadband card on almost 10 Latitude E6400 systems, versus less than three HP EliteBook 6930p systems and almost four Lenovo ThinkPad T400 systems. We have received a lot of great feedback from customers on our serviceability.
I'm sure that everyone wants to know how battery life testing went, especially since HP has been less than transparent on how they arrived at the ad slogan of 24 hours. In our third party apples-to-apples test using MobileMark 2007 (MM07), we found that the Latitude E6400 went beyond our claim of 19 hours to 20 hours 9 minutes due to continuous improvements we have put into production. Although HP came in at 21 hours 4 minutes (only a 55-minute difference), additional Latitude E6400 features like eSata, contactless smart card reader and ControlVault out-class the competition. Also, we have an All Day Battery life mode accessed through Dell Control Point software that enables even longer battery life. It is a setting used to extend battery life as needed, but we disabled it for testing in order to comply with MM07 "run rules."