Battery life is something we haven’t seen a great deal of technological advancements in recent years. We see some new features and screens, plus hardware that are friendlier on battery life, but even then it’s not by a great amount. When you combine that with the fact that as things get smaller, the battery is going to have to get smaller too. All of a sudden we get stuck in a cycle of batteries not doing much extra production compared to what we were seeing before.
All of that is before any kind of unfriendly new type of firmware that a company may have pushed out. These can often lead to unkind battery drain because of some problems inside. Ironically, that isn’t the case this time around at all, and with this firmware update, it is the secret to having a longer lasting battery life.
The update is arriving over the air, which is the same one that was issued to combat the Marvell WiFi solution. Once you have it updated you should notice an instant improvement. The old one would have given around 6 hours of battery life and the new one will give you around 7.
Efficiency will also depend on what it is that you are using. Some gray areas are still being reported as bad like the video playback side of things. On the other side of the spectrum web browsing has seen a dramatic increase.
Via: AnandTech