Microsoft hasn’t taken the first-generation Surface Pro tablet’s endurance woes lying down. After subpar battery life tempered enthusiasm for the original, the Surface Pro 2 upped its face time to 6 hours—still not great for a slate, but a 20-percent improvement over its predecessor.
Then, shortly after the Surface Pro 2 shipped, Microsoft pushed out a firmware update that promised yet more battery life. Could refined software give the Surface Pro 2 hardware an even bigger boost?
Yes—but the gains vary greatly depending on the way you use the tablet.
PCWorld Lab Manager Tony Leung has been battering the Surface Pro 2 with a barrage of battery tests ever since we first reported about the firmware update, benchmarking the same unit both sans firmware update and post-firmware update. (Thanks Tony!) Every benchmark was run twice to ensure consistency, which is why it took us a few days to post this.
PCWorld’s standard laptop battery test turns off adaptive brightness and places devices into airplane mode, and then loops the PCMark 7 Productivity Suite and a video (using the VLC player) in 10-minute intervals until the machine poops out. The firmware update enhanced the Surface Pro 2’s endurance in this test by 24 minutes, as you can see in the chart above—a welcome improvement, but not an earth-shattering one at merely six percent.
But wait! AnandTech reported that the firmware update improves battery life by allowing the Marvell Wi-Fi chip inside to settle down in lower power states. That publication’s testing showed a whopping 25 percent leap in battery life when browsing websites post-update. We also ran a Wi-Fi browsing benchmark, using Google Chrome to visit a list of 20 different websites every 30 seconds.
Via: PCWorld
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