driving the ultra-mobile enterprise

For mobile professionals and businesses alike, power consumption plays a pivotal role in the day-to-day activities of mobile warriors. Laptops now exceed desktops in sales in the PC market, so it’s inevitable that businesses are looking to outfit more and more of its employees with laptops when the time comes to upgrade computer systems.

It used to be that businesses were faced with either high performance/non-portability with a desktop system or poor performance/high-portability with laptop systems. Thanks to advances in processing technology, laptops are closing the gap when it comes to performance when compared to their desktop counterparts.

However, there is one area which hasn’t seen much advancement in the laptop industry: battery power/efficiency. Lithium-ion batteries are the lifeblood of laptops when they are away from a power outlet. Businesses rely on their employees to provide timely information when out in the field, so a laptop with little consideration for power consumption is likely not a wise choice.

While few improvements – short of increasing the cell count – have been made to lithium-ion batteries to improve battery life on laptops, chip manufacturers and laptop OEMs have devised ways of their own to improve battery life on machines.

Low-power processors

While quad core processors are becoming more prevalent for business use for CPU-intensive applications, dual core processors are still overwhelmingly favored in the laptop market. Laptop manufacturers like Lenovo and HP often look to Intel’s Core 2 Duo processors to provide a fine balance between performance and power efficiency.

For businesses that don’t require a lot of horsepower, Intel’s ultra-low voltage (ULV) Core 2 Duo processors can be had in speeds ranging from 1.06 GHz to 1.2 GHz and low-voltage (LV) Core 2 Duo processors top out at 1.6GHz. These processors sip power, while at the same time offering up just enough performance to handle most day-to-day tasks required by the average mobile user. Intel’s standard voltage Core 2 Duo mobile processors don’t give up much in terms of performance to their desktop counterparts, but they will cost you a bit more in terms of power efficiency when compared to the ULV and LV offerings.

LED-backlit displays

Notebooks have used fluorescent lamps for backlighting for years. While fluorescent lamps are a proven technology, a new technology known as light-emitting diode (LED) backlighting is taking the laptop industry by storm. LED technology provides brighter images with better contrast, thinner display panels, less heat output, and most importantly, lower power consumption.

Solid-state drives

Solid-state drives (SSDs) are seen as the new frontier in computer storage. The mechanical, spinning hard disk drive (HDD) hasn’t changed much in basic principal since its inception over 50 years ago. While technology has advanced to the point where we now have speedy 2.5” HDDs with capacities of up to 500GB for mobile applications, there is always room for improvement. SSDs excel over HDDs on a number of front including faster read/write speeds, lighter weight, silent operation, shock-proof design, and of course, lower power consumption. Although the power savings may sometimes be as little as an extra 10 to 15 minutes of battery life, that power reserve could be critical for an employee that needs to deliver time-sensitive material to his or her employer.

Single-level cell (SLC) SSDs provide the best performance in most situations, but are quite expensive to obtain. Multi-level cell (MLC) SSDs provide a nice boost in read performance, but suffer somewhat in write speeds when compared to SLC SSDs. However, MLC SSDs can sometimes be hundreds less than comparable SLC models. Regardless of which route you take, a well-designed SLC or MLC SSD will provide a good speed and battery life boost for a laptop.

Choosing a laptop with one or more of these technologies will go a long way to reducing power consumption and boosting the battery life for employees on the road. Companies like Lenovo are using all three technologies in laptops like the ThinkPad X301 which uses a low voltage 1.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SL7100 processor, LED-backlit display, and a 64GB SSD. When coupled with an extended battery, the extreme attention to low-power consumption allows the ThinkPad X301 to operate for up to 10 hours.

In the near future, we may look to new advances in battery technology to improve battery life even more on laptops. ZPower is pushing its silver-zinc battery which it claims holds 30 percent higher energy density than lithium-ion batteries and is 95 percent recyclable. Fuel cell technology is also progressing nicely for mobile applications and should be viable in the laptop market with the next 1-2 years.