As promised, I ran the famous Battery Eater test on the Vye S37 and have the results. For those not familiar with Battery Eater, it’s a freeware application that performs a load test on a mobile device to determine the minimum run-time for that device. In other words: it roughly replicates how long your battery would last if you went full bore on your device. Keep that in mind with the results, since real-world use is nearly always better than Battery Eater’s results… unless you continuously go 100% with your device, of course. For a frame of reference, I’ve done no optimizations on the Vye, had the brightness set to 40% (because it’s plenty bright at that level) and had WiFi on. In other words, this is an subjective "average" use case. You’ll get better battery life if you optimize, use proper power management, turn off wireless radios when not in use, etc…..
The Vye died out around 3 hours and 17 minutes on the included 6-cell battery which seemed low to me at first, but sounds about right when you consider I’m getting a solid 4+ hours when using the device during the daily grind. That also jives with Steve’s data: using a 3-cell battery, he saw two hours of use with WiFi. Why the graph starts around 95% or so, I can’t be sure. According to Battery Eater, the battery was at 100% capacity when I started the test. It’s possible that it wasn’t for some reason, so you might eek out another few (read: < 5) minutes.
I’m still not convinced we’ve gained all that much from the Intel A11x CPUs. From what I can see at this point, it’s simply been a swap of performance for battery life. As I’ve said in the past: when I consider a mobile device I personally think long and hard about that balance. It’s much easier to add power than it is to add performance. Just my opinion, of course and your needs will certainly vary from mine. It doesn’t change the fact that the Vye is a very capable little sub-notebook! I’ll plan to wrap up my experience with the Vye S37 in a final thoughts post within a few days. Thanks again to Dynamism for the loaned unit


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