Terralogic have today run benchmark tests of their Toughnote Series D-13 laptop against the new fully rugged laptop from Dell - the Latitude E6400-XFR.

Burn-In Test version 5.3 Pro runs machines at their chosen performance settings and measures, among other things, one of the most important elements of laptop usage - battery life.

If you were to rely purely on marketing material you would be disappointed in the results we found.

Toughnote Series D-13 marketing material claims battery life of 3-4 hours (we always claim battery life figures based on using the machine in real life scenarios - ie, processor running at full speed, LCD backlight on full, standard spinning HDD) whereas Dell claims a remarkable 6 hours (we could find no notes to describe what usage profile Dell used for their tests, although it definitely was not "full power").

Running a Duo Core 1.66 GHz Toughnote Series D-13 vs the Duo Core 2.6 GHz Dell machine showed some stunning results - despite the Dell using a low power solid state hard drive.

On full performance the Dell ran out of battery in just 1 hour and 17 minutes, while the Toughnote still had 54 % battery life left.

On "Dell Recommended" performance the Dell ran out of power in 1 hour 52 minutes, while the Toughnote still had 43% battery life left remaining.

The results of these tests show conclusively that, while it is a good high performance machine in terms of processing power (because of its higher performance, higer voltage components) the Toughnote Series D-13 massively outperforms the Dell in terms of battery use.

At Terralogic we see no point in claiming high performance characteristics, then downgrading these to improve a battery life metric.

For more information on these tests contact our technical staff on +44 (0) 29 2064 7040.

In both sets of tests the backlights were turned on to full brightness to reflect true in-field use where LCD visibility is invariably of primary importance.