Lenovo ThinkPad Edge 13: Not your Father's ThinkPad
by Vivek Gowri on April 7, 2010 1:40 AM ESTBattery Life
The ThinkPad Edge offers solid battery life, with nearly eight hours of runtime in our idle battery life test and over six hours in our internet battery benchmark. Unfortunately, this doesn't hold a candle to some of the other CULV notebooks on the market. With the same size 6-cell 5600 mAh, 63 Wh battery, the Acer 1810T gets a full two hours more idle runtime and 84 minutes more in the internet battery benchmark. The same trend holds for the Gateway EC5409c and Dell Inspiron 11z - the Edge simply cannot match their power consumption, even with similar components and an equal battery size.
Curiously, the Edge has better battery life numbers under HD video playback than the other 6-cell CULV offerings, but that could be explained by various differences in screen, hard drive, and memory, as those are the mainly stressed parts of the video benchmarks. The disparity in power consumption and battery life becomes even larger when you compare the Edge to notebooks with 8-cell batteries, like the UL30/80Vt and Alienware M11x. The UL80Vt we tested last year offered significantly better battery life than the Edge in IGP mode, and similar battery life when running on the dedicated NVIDIA G210M graphics card.
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xerophinity - Saturday, April 10, 2010 - link
This notebook doesn't deserve to have the name Thinkpad anywhere on it.. what the hell was Lenovo thinking? It's like BMW sourcing out a car design to GM and putting their name on it.orangesky - Tuesday, April 13, 2010 - link
According to Lenovo's website, and just about every other review I've read of the Edge 13, it does NOT have an EC/34 slot. The 14 & 15 does, but not the 13. Some 13.3 CULVs that do have it include Sony VAIO Y Series and the Dell Vostro V13 / Latitude 13.jolly_jugg - Tuesday, April 20, 2010 - link
"The CULV models start at $700 ($800 MSRP) and with few noteworthy benefits, the Edge is going to be a tough sell. The AMD model drops the price to under $500, but unfortunately battery life also plummets, so unless you're dying for a "Heatwave Red" ThinkPad the AMD Edge may not be the compromise you're after"I have to say your review appears pretty sarcastic. Lets assume the average battery life of both the machines (Average means all kind of applications like web browsing, word type, spreadsheet and multimedia) are 4 hours for intel machine and AMD comes 25% lower at 3 hours. Now are you implying a 25% more average battery power is worth compared to 60% higher average selling price for an Intel machine over AMD machine? Even if 50% of the folks agree with you, I am sure the other 50% will disagree with you. Sure battery power is important for a portable equipment, but equally as important is the price which in this case is 60% lower. For you that may not be the compromise you are looking for but for me its definitely a good compromise, particularly in these trying economic times where salaries are lower and returns are also pretty lower.
Sky Park Schiphol - Wednesday, April 21, 2010 - link
Very interesting. After all of the "you can only integrate the memory controller once" and "it locks you into a specific memory type" talk from Intel back in the Athlon 64 era, now they're taking that route with their ultra low power CPU/platform. Best machine ever, thanks for sharing and great comments. Thanks http://www.smartparkingschiphol.com/vliegvelden/sc...