Welcome to a laptop battery specialist
of the Fujitsu Laptop Battery
When you use a smartphone all day long, it’s easy to think that every screen in your life should respond to touch. Touch screens are necessary on handsets, tablets and 2-in-1 hybrids that transform from notebooks to slates. They even provide a lot of benefits on large-screen all-in-one PCs that sit in your living room. However, no matter how badly vendors want to sell you one, a traditional laptop with a touch screen is a terrible idea and a bad buy.
Here are five reasons you should just say “no” to touch-enabled notebooks with battery like Fujitsu LifeBook M1010 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP207 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP208 Battery, Fujitsu LifeBook N6400 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP164Z Battery, Fujitsu LifeBook P1620 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP144 Battery, Fujitsu LifeBook E8210 Battery, Fujitsu LifeBook N3400 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP120 Battery, Fujitsu LifeBook Q2010 Battery, Fujitsu FMVNBP152 Battery.
While some laptops are available only with a touch screen, others offer touch as a pricey option when you configure your system. For example, Lenovo charges $240 more for a ThinkPad T450s with a touch screen than the same model without a touch screen, and Dell puts a $300 premium on its XPS 13 with touch, though it also bumps the resolution up from 1080p to 3200 x 1800. Acer’s inexpensive C720 Chromebook costs $80 more with touch — which doesn’t sound too bad, until you consider that it’s 30 percent of the price.
But even if the touch version isn’t any more expensive, or if you find a notebook that’s only available with touch, you should avoid it like an email from a Nigerian prince.
Regardless of whether you use it, the touch digitizer is on all the time and thus sucks up significantly more power. For example, on the Dell XPS 13 we tested, the nontouch version lasted 11 hours and 42 minutes on the Laptop Mag Battery Test, which involves continuous Web surfing over Wi-Fi. However, the touch configuration lasted only 7 hours and 24 minutes —a delta of 37 percent. (To be fair, the touch XPS has a higher, quad-HD resolution, which sucks more power than the full-HD nontouch version.)
When we tested the original ThinkPad X1 Carbon with and without touch, the difference in battery life was 24 percent — 5:52 compared to 7:45.
Unfortunately, you can’t do anything about this battery penalty after you’ve bought a touch-screen laptop. When we tried disabling the touch screen (using Windows Device Manager) on two notebooks and ran our test, the results were nearly identical. The digitizer continues to slurp power, even if it can’t respond to your taps.