The new crop of 11 to 12 inch laptops from Acer, Asus, HP, Dell, Lenovo, and others have a few things going for them. They tend to be thin, light, and more powerful than your typical 10 inch netbook while offering better CPU and graphics performance. And in most cases they get battery life that’s as good or better than what you’d find from an Intel Atom powered netbook.
I haven’t had a chance to test the Asus UL20A yet, but the Asus UL30A, for example, gets around 9 to 10 hours on a charge. The UL30A features a 13.3 inch display and slightly higher capacity battery than the UL20A, but Asus says the UL20A should get about 7.5 hours of run time.
I’m looking forward to testing the batteries on more of these Intel CULV-powered laptops. But in the meantime, Peter at Netbooked has been testing a Lenovo IdeaPad U150 for the last few days, and it looks like he’s getting between 4 and 5 hours of run time from this machine with a dual core Intel Celeron SU2300 processor.
Surfing the web with WiFi and Bluetooth on, he was able to squeeze 4 hours, 44 minutes out of the battery. The impressive thing is that he was also able ot get 4 hours, 23 minutes when playing a 720p video in full-screen.
Sure, there are plenty of Atom powered netbooks that gets 7 or more hours of battery life. But it sounds like the Lenovo IdeaPad U150 is comparable to the Asus Eee PC 1000H I picked up about 14 months ago when it comes to battery life. In the performance department, the Lenovo computer beats the Eee PC 1000H in almost every conceivable way.
You can see more of Peter’s impressions in a video after the break.