September 8, 2008 3:38 PM PDT

HP laptop claims to break 24-hour battery life barrier

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This is an HP laptop similar to the one that offers 24-hour battery life.

(Credit: Hewlett-Packard)

Hewlett-Packard says it has achieved a mobile-computing milestone by getting the HP EliteBook 6930p to operate continuously for 24 hours on a single battery charge. The laptop used in the test is, however, rather different from those consumers would pick up at the store, at least for now.

The machine's equipped with high-end components including Intel solid-state hard drives (SSDs), a mercury-free LED display, and an optional ultra-capacity battery.

The cream-of-the-crop components played a crucial role in making the 24-hour battery life possible. HP says the Illumi-Lite LED display, by itself, boosts battery run time by up to four hours compared with traditional LCD displays, and the Intel SSD provides up to a 7 percent increase in battery life compared with traditional hard drives.

In addition to helping achieve outstanding battery life, Intel's SSDs provide greater durability and reliability as well as faster system responsiveness. HP claims its benchmarks show overall performance boosts of up to 57 percent on industry benchmarks, and data transfer rates almost six times faster than traditional hard disks.

While these numbers and the claimed battery life haven't been confirmed by CNET Labs' independent tests, they'd better be true as the components used in the test unit can easily dig a big hole in your wallet. Take the new SSDs, for example. They cost about 6 to 10 times more than regular hard drives.

Starting in October, you'll be able to purchase an HP EliteBook with the new Intel high-performance SSDs, if you can afford it, as HP is one of Intel's partners for its launch of the new Intel X25-M and X18-M Mainstream SATA SSDs.

Dong Ngo is a CNET editor who covers networking and network storage, and writes about anything else he finds interesting. You can also listen to his podcast at insidecnetlabs.cnet.com. E-mail Dong.