Tablets are the hot ticket in the computing space, if the comments by Intel CEO Paul Otellini are any indication. Otellini devoted a lot of time to the tablet space in his recent financial results call, and even acknowledged Apple’s iPad has impacted Intel’s business. All other iPad features aside, Intel has a big task taking on the iPad with tablets running its chips: long battery life. The 10+ hours of battery life on the iPad aren’t something Intel chipsets can easily deliver.
The 10 hours of battery life on the iPad aren’t merely a “manufacturer’s estimate;” it’s a solid reality for those using the tablet. The ability to run for longer than a day is a game changer for many iPad users, and the competition must deal with this. It is not clear how Intel-based products can achieve such long run times between charges without compromising the small, light form the iPad brings to the consumer. Existing products with Intel processors that get comparable run times are doing it by using large, heavy batteries; that’s not an option on tablets that will appeal to the average consumer.
To be fair, battery life isn’t the only feature that drives acceptance of a consumer tablet product, but it’s an important one. Perhaps upcoming Intel processors will make this easier to achieve than current chips. That’s what Intel is counting on, as Otellini indicated new Atom processors would be driving the company’s tablet business in the future. Competition is a good thing, so let’s hope Intel is able to deliver. The iPad has set the standard: 10 hours is the tablet battery benchmark, and anything less will not compete.
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):
A friend and I surfed the web, checked email, listened to music and watched a movie on my iPad this weekend on a single charge…she offered two unsolicited comments in comparison to her laptop — 1) “I can’t believe how long the battery lasts” and 2) “The screen is so bright and sharp”. Thus, James, you are spot on.
Well Intel is going to have to go back to the drawing board if they intend to offer up the anemic Z530 Atom in the upcoming HP slate. The problem with the Atom is that it was never designed for slate devices – evidently the form factor and battery life expectations are different.
On the other hand, you need exactly the Atom to run something like Windows 7, a much more full-featured computing environment than the iPad. So you are forced to make the classic trade-off in performance versus battery times.
Don’t discount AMD from the picture either – their Nile platform is already making it’s way into 10″ netbooks, but if next year’s Bobcat architecture is any indication, we may see AMD-powered Windows tablets giving Intel a good run for it’s money!
Tablet battery life is at least as much determined by screen brightness as the CPU. Intel tablets can get the same runtime as iPad by having a dimmer screen (backlight) to make up for higher CPU power consumption. Since Apple doesn’t tend to brag about screen brightness per se, many customers might never know the difference.