RSSHP may trump Dell with a 24-hour battery-powered EliteBook
By Jacqueline Emigh | Published September 9, 2008, 6:11 PM
Tired of watching your laptop batteries conk out after two hours, even though the brochure promised four? Next month, HP expects to ship an EliteBook 6930p notebook that promises a phenomenal 24 hours of battery life without recharging.
Only about a month after Dell's rollout of Latitude notebooks with 19 hours of battery life, Hewlett-Packard has announced plans to ship its own high-end business laptop -- the EliteBook 6390p -- complete with a high capacity battery option able to deliver a full day of battery operation, without recharging.
First announced earlier this year along with more than a dozen other HP notebooks, the new EliteBook also boasts options that include solid-state drives (SSDs) from Intel and a mercury-free 14.1-inch IllumiLite LED screen. HP waited until this week, though, to announce the 24-hour battery life feat.
HP credits the machine's other components for helping to supply an entire day of battery use. The Intel SSDs, for instance, bring up to a 7% battery life increase over traditional hard drives. The IllumiLite boosts battery life a full four hours over conventional displays, officials said in a statement.
HP also touts Intel's X25-M and X18-M SATA SSD options -- slated for availability, too, in October -- with delivering data transfer rates nearly six times faster than those of HDs.
The EliteBook 6930p will weigh in at an astonishing 4.7 pounds, though conceivably, the high-capacity battery may bring it back to a weight on a par with the average notebook. HP has not specified the material it's using for its high capacity battery, nor has it revealed its own weight separately. BetaNews is pressing HP for more information.
The 6930p won't be so easy on the wallet. Although it is being sold for several hundred dollars in discounts through Web retailers such as OnSale.com and GloriaOne.com, the new EliteBook starts at $1,899 on HP's site, without either the high-capacity battery or other high-end options.
what about the individual 24 hr. notebook battery itself;how much will it cost to purchase it individually ?
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|Nice move by HP, although I am dubious as to wether this will work for 24 hours in the real world. Plus HP support via Infocare is really awful
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|24 hours in hibernation mode or actively browsing the web... messenger etc.
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|Just like hybrid vehicles, are the improvements worth the extra cost? Generally, no. Unless you *really really really* need 24-hour of battery life and are in the middle of *insert BFE location*, I don't see the lure of these given the ginormous price premium.
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|Yup, hype the asserted and unverified capability and make no mention of the real cost associated with them - only pushing the low-ball price of the configuration utterly lacking any of the hyped capabilities.
Congrats.
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|BetaNews rewards HP, Dell, etc. with plenty of free publicity by publishing stories like this, but if BetaNews performed with the same enthusiasm any pro-customer investigative reporting, each of these product announcements would carry a WARNING LABEL about CONTEMPT-FOR-THE-CUSTOMER support.
So, readers, how fluent are you in Costa-Rican Spanglish and Bangalorean Hinglish?
When your HP product fails under an HP warranty or support contract, you will most likely experience the sheer delight of dealing with multiple low-wage, outsourced foreigners who are not HP employees but, instead, clueless peons of el-cheapo support companies that HP uses, such as Sitel and Convergys:
"Replacing 10- to 20-year [HP] veterans with people who have barely a three-month training course is reprehensible, to the customer that is. HP sees no problem here. To make matters worse, HP then lets go anyone with experience, so the corporate knowledge base and memory is gone for good.
"While you can't get much worse than that from the HP side, you can still rub salt in the customers' wounds. They have already paid for service and support contracts, and from everything I heard, were not consulted or even told this was happening. Same for 'partners.' Surprise, we just saved money on your back, and if your service stinks, call sales, they can help.
"From what a deep insider told us, the plan is simple. If you minimally train people and hire fresh graduates without much experience, they cost less and you save money. When customers howl in protest, you up-sell them on premium support, where they can have the old level of access back with the few remaining clued-in people.
"If you notice, this is the same strategy that ran Dell into the ground. Make support suck and up-sell. When customers complain, ignore it until it hits the bottom line. By then, you have moved on to a different company, and Dell 2.0 -- The Repair, is someone else's problem. It is almost like the same people are running the show at HP. Oh wait, they are."
[Source: http://www.theinquirer.n...sourcing-plans-unveiled]
Be sure to read the confidential HP memo revealed there. Also, click through the links to other related articles.
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|The only problem with your complaint is that it is not limited to HP or Dell!
The entire computer industry has been commoditized and it does not require a PhD in computer engineering to sell a commodity device.
Face it, these things are being sold at WalMart and Office Depot!
Or just take a step into the Apple store and deal with dweebs for whom exuberance serves as a replacement for knowledge...
This is like listening to someone who has just discovered that the shoe manufacturing and repair industry is on the wane...too little and too late.
So while impassioned, try using a few of those prodigious brain cells. ;-))
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|I am well aware of the state of the market, Mr. Obvious, but I still hold accountable these companies and the reporters who advertise these companies' products.
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|Such emotional ire, such pathos, such crap.
Spoken like an out of work ex-HPer who sat all day in front of a terminal querying supposed fixes from a database of similar goofball non-solutions authored by other 3 week trained support agents who subjected customers to their versions of support abuse.
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