Battery Performance: Four Hours Of Real-World Use
RLUMark is a “Real Life Use” benchmark that models what you might experience from day-to-day experiences with battery life. The metric is programmed to simulate a user typing at ~45 WPM and reading at ~200 WPM.
This session consists of the following, run sequentially in the order listed:
- 24 minutes of Wikipedia reading (four entries): one tab per entry
- 4 minutes of Amazon.com: two tabs
- 3 minutes of CNN.com: two tabs
- 2 minutes of Google Finance: one tab
- 2 minutes of Accuweather: one tab
- 25 minutes of Flash 10.1 video (YouTube 360p, H.264, hardware acceleration enabled): one tab
Even though the 13.3" Series 9 comes with a smaller battery pack than Lenovo's ThinkPad X230T, it's able to achieve almost four hours in our battery life test. This is a direct result of the Ultrabook's 17 W Core i7-3517U. Lenovo's 35 W Ivy Bridge-based processor is potentially faster, but it necessitates a larger battery as well.
Charging a battery quickly is more convenient, but it's harder on the power source itself, cutting into its service life. Vendors generally slow the charge rate in the 80% to 95% capacity range to stave off this effect. That's why charging from 0% to 10% is faster than 90% to 100%.
The time it takes to recharge a battery usually correlates with battery life, and that's what we see from Samsung's 13.3" Series 9. However, considering it takes nearly three-and-a-half hours to reach a full charge; true road warriors might even want to look into an external battery.