Dell made quite a bit of news when they announced the latest update to their line of Latitude business notebooks. The new E-Series models are indeed quite stylish and pack a great feature set and, remarkably for Dell, clean industrial designs. But the biggest talking point that people have latched onto about these notebooks is that 19-hour battery life claim that is being tossed around. No, there was not some magical breakthrough in battery technology exclusive to Dell, it’s just the addition of a very-large secondary battery. jkOnTheRun did a limited examination of this however let’s delve into specifics and prices. Here are the details on how this is feat is actually achieved by Dell…

Dell Latitude E6400 14.1″ Notebook (19-hours)

• 9-Cell Primary Battery ($99 CTO)
• 12-Cell Secondary “Slice” Battery - 84Whr ($399 CTO)
• High-capacity 9-cell adds 0.4lbs over the standard 6-cell battery
• Slice battery adds 1.78lbs to the overall weight of the laptop and 0.6″ in thickness

Overall, it’s quite a bit of asterisks checking to see how this battery life claim comes to fruition. It requires the addition of $500 in power accessories and adds some serious heft to the notebook but this isn’t too large a compromise for the serious business traveller or power user that needs all-day battery life when they don’t have the luxury of power-outlets for a top-up at every turn. Again, the claim from Dell needs to put into perspective - when I first read about the feature, I questioned my recent order of a Lenovo X200 (which offers 9 hour battery life off a single nine-cell). The X200 manages this with a still svelte form-factor and still weighs in at just a bit over 3 1/2 pounds. Dell does claim however, that the nineteen hour figure is based off realistic everyday mobile user, which we’ll see once the reviews and benchmarks begin to trickle out.