MSI Wind U115 Battery Runs Longer Than You Need, Not Longer Than You Want

We already knew the U115, with its hybrid SSD/HDD magic, would manage to have excellent battery life. But what happens when you match up this battery-stretching beast with a mammoth 9-cell laptop battery? You break records, that’s what.

Not all that long ago, the U115 was reported as capable of achieving 12 hours of battery life on a 6-cell battery. This is due to the fact that the netbook has an HDD for mass storage but runs most basic tasks on a power-sipping SSD. But recent reports from Johannes of the German site Eee-PC.de have put the U115 at a mind boggling 25 hours and 4 minutes on a single charge.

Johannes used a batteryeater test on the lowest possible settings to get his results. Conversely, LaptopMag put the U115 under a more rigorous test of constant websurfing – and it still squeezed out 10 hours and 32 minutes. Your real life usage will probably be somewhere in between.

Frankly, if a laptop gets 5-6 hours of charge I’m fairly happy with it, especially if it doesn’t require an oversized battery that juts out awkwardly. But I’m not going to complain about a little jutting when it’s getting me 20 odd hours of juice. Finally, a single device on which I can continuously watch 10 hours of movies, listen to 10 hours of music, and all the while work on my various business reports while flying nonstop to Australia. Or perhaps even more importantly, I can finally forget to bring my power cord to work for 3 consecutive days without it mattering anymore.

Sarcasm aside, I am drooling over the prospect of a 7+ day mini-notebook battery by 2015. If my 4 year old and former “free 2 year upgrade” cellphone can still do it, why not netbooks?