Microsoft promised a 75 percent increase in battery life for Surface Pro 2 over the original, and the company delivered. In our review we noted that the Surface Pro 2 lasted 7 hours, 33 minutes on the Verge Battery Test, which cycles through a series of websites and high-res images with screen brightness set to 65 percent. Anandtech has discovered that a recently released Surface Pro 2 firmware update has pushed the battery life even further.
Surface Pro 2 battery life improves by almost 20 percent after firmware update
is a senior correspondent and author of Notepad, who has been covering all things Microsoft, PC, and tech for over 20 years.
In our own Verge Battery Test we can confirm that the battery life on the Surface Pro 2 has increased to 8 hours, 51 minutes following the firmware update, an almost 20 percent increase. Anandtech notes that the improvements appear to be related to a change that lets the Marvell Wi-Fi chipset use less power. The improvements are impressive and help improve the viability of using the device all day as a tablet or a laptop. Microsoft’s Surface 2 tablet, running on Windows RT 8.1, has not received similar battery improvements in its firmware update, meaning the Pro 2 outpaces the ARM-based model on battery life.
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