Fujitsu U2010 won't really run for 11 hours
So the internet is ablaze with excitement today over the newly reported "11-hour battery life" of the Fujitsu LOOX U/B50N (better known as the U2010 or U820) with its optional 4-cell 5800mAh li-ion battery. Since many sites rewrite information from a single source without doing any additional research, few are questioning why the U2010’s official press release mentioned only a 9-hour runtime . . . and that was with the SSD option. Extended battery life with the standard HDD was listed as "up to 8 hours."
There’s no denying that an 8-hour battery life is excellent for a UMPC, but 8 hours is hardly 11. In fact, it’s nearly 30% less.
The LOOX U/B50N specs do state that "about 11.1 hours" is possible with the high-capacity battery, so Fujitsu isn’t intentionally trying to mislead or deceive consumers. The reason for the discrepancy, unfortunately, is what you see there in the parentheses next to "note 16" above: JEITA determination 1.0.
The JEITA (Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association) Battery Run Time Measurement Method for Notebook PCs was introduced in 2001 and has been used ever since by manufacturers like Fujitsu to measure battery life. Unfortunately, as UMPCPortal highlighted over a year ago (in reference to the U1010 no less!), the JEITA test is not representative at all of real-world usage. You can read about the method here (PDF).
Steve recommended that we "reduce manufacturer’s [battery] claims by 30%" when JEITA is concerned, which as you can see from the U2010’s 11-hour JEITA estimate and the 8-hour press release estimate is still very good advice. Apply that rule to the LOOX U’s standard 5.3-hour JEITA runtime and you’ll see that the 3.5-hour figure revealed last month is probably accurate too.
In short, expect about 4 hours with the standard battery and 8 hours with the extended one from the new Atom-based Fujitsu LifeBook mini convertible UMPC.
