Intel Targets All-day Battery Life for Netbooks

From PC World: The ability to run a netbook all day on a single battery charge is one of the goals Intel has set for itself as it develops the Atom platform.

"We are going to do more integration, we are going to try to reduce the power in order to have sleekest form-factor, the lightest system and to increase the battery life," said Mooly Eden, head of Intel's mobile platforms group, in an interview at the Computex trade show in Taipei on Wednesday. "The idea is to deliver such a product that will be day-long. You'll be able to go with your netbook without the need to carry the power supply."

The target, a sure-fire way to praise from road warriors, is more easily said than done. Most of today's laptops offer between three and five hours on a standard three-cell battery and close to double that on a six-cell battery. But the longer-life batteries are bulkier and heavier, and that negates a lot of the reason for having a slim and lightweight machine.

"We'll either need to have more than a three-cell battery or have some kind of prismatic battery, which is not necessarily a cell, or wait until the chemistry and physics improve and people will be able to give us higher density," said Eden.

Energy density is a measure of the amount of energy that can be held by a battery for a given unit of volume. Increasing it would mean a battery could supply more power without being made bigger. However, achieving significant advances could take years.

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