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HP knows battery life degradation is a big consideration for notebooks. As great as the day-long battery life of the Sony Vaio TT or the tempting promised 20-40 hour Pixel Qi Laptop are, it's a fact of (battery) life that those figures don't last for ever. Eventually batteries degrade and die. HP, though, in collaboration with Boston-Power, is helping stave off that process to a significant degree.

A new battery called the Sonata by its developers Boston-Power and re-branded as the Enviro by HP ups the usual 300-cycle breaking point of most consumer batteries, whereupon the maximum capacity starts to degrade, to an extremely impressive 1,000 cycles. That means, maths fans, that even if charged daily, the maximum power capacity of an Enviro battery won't drop for nigh-on two years nine months if charged daily. Weekday only charging would extend that close to four years and workday-only charges would obviously be even better.

That's important because four years is pretty much as long as anyone is likely to keep a laptop for. The average HP laptop customer, then, should never notice any reduction in the batter life of their system. The Enviro battery also boasts some pretty fast charging times, reaching 80 per cent capacity in a mere 30 minutes.

HP will, InfoWorld reports, be charging around $20 to $30 (~£14-20) extra on systems it sells fitted with Enviro batteries. Initially these will only be available in the US, but apparently HP is looking to extend that to other territories - UK first please!

I just hope Boston-Power can hurry up and license this technology to manufacturers other than HP - which it is apparently quite happy to do. I could probably use a longer lasting, faster charging battery in my laptop!

Link:
Infoworld.

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