The Wall Street Journal has had a chance to heavily test the Nokia Booklet 3G, including the supposedly 12-hour battery recently. The Nokia Booklet 3G is Nokia’s first foray into the laptop/netbook arena, and with my brief hands-on with it, is quite slick. I’ve owned three other netbooks thus far, and the Booklet 3G is definitely one of the most promising, so I can’t wait to get my own review unit.
When Nokia announced the Booklet 3G, they claimed it would be able to get 12 hours of actual real-world usage from its monstrous 16-cell battery. In fact, the entire machine was supposedly built around the battery, according to the product manager I had a chance to chat with at Nokia World 2009. In its testing, the Wall Street Journal found the Nokia Booklet was able to pump out 8 hours of real usage, though their setup was slightly intense. Katherine Boehret tested the Booklet 3G with its screen brightness maxed out, WiFi running, music playing, and all of the power-saving features turned off.
While the high screen brightness, WiFi, and music are normal usage, I’m curious as to why she would have disabled the power-saving features, as those are, by name, part of what contributes to the longer battery life. As an example, my Asus 1000HE EeePC is rated at 7-9 hours of battery life, though in my usage (similar to Katherine’s, though with power-saving features enabled) I get about 5-6 in real life. Given this, I would expect you could leave the power saving features on and turn the screen brightness down one or two notches to easily achieve that advertised 12-hour battery life.
Though I’m disappointed in the Windows 7 Starter Edition and not Home Premium, I’m hoping to get my hands on a review unit of the Nokia Booklet 3G soon, and will *definitely* be testing out anything and everything, including that insane battery life. Here’s the video from the WSJ, courtesy of IntoMobile:
Ricky Cadden 