I just read the first professional review on the T410 and the battery life does not even come close to the promised 18 hours on Lenovos website. 4:11 h in idle without WLAN and min brightness. 2 h when playing a DVD. The test included a 6 cell battery. On Lenovo website the T410 and T510 is supposed to have 9 cell batteries?

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Lenovo-Thinkpad-T410-2522-3FG-Notebook.25368.0.html

There is also a lot of confusion about the discrete/switchable graphics. Available only for T410s says Lenovos website. Only the T410s doesn´t even have discrete graphics?

I think it´s time someone shead some light on this. What is the actual battery life on the various models in different performance modes? Will graphics be switchable or not?  

Regards

Sidan77

You have clearly gotten something wrong here, it's indeed possible to obtain T410 and T510 machines featuring 6cell battery, if you read reviews and watch the current unboxings on YouTube you'll see that most of them have bought it with 6cell battery as it wont stick out on the back.

So where you've got the whole "9cell only" stuff from I'm not sure? Even the W510 you can get with a 6cell?

And of course the battery life is way lower with the 6cell compared to the 9cell!

When it comes to switch-able graphics I'm not sure, all T410, T410s and T510 featuring discrete graphics should have switch-able graphics? As the Arrandale CPU's got their Intel graphics on the CPU chip, you are kinda forced to have both the Intel and Nvidia graphics when going for something with discrete graphics?

Might be that there isn't any drivers out yet, making it impossible to switch between the two, forcing the Nvidia graphics to be active all the time? I don't really know..

Though you are also mistaken on this part, you can get T410s machines featuring discrete graphics..

Ok, fair enough, 9-cell battery is an option. I got the information about the 9-cell battery from the Lenovo website:

Get up to 13 hours of battery life on the T400 model and even up to 18 hours with the Slice 9-cell battery (available on T410 and T510 models) for all-day computing.67

But according to the footnote, I realize that these numbers are with maximum battery capacity which explains alot. 

These configurations have been tested on notebookcheck for a comparison

T400, 6-cell, P8600, integrated Intel GMA 4500MHD graphic chip
Idle (without WLAN, min brightness)  4h 26min 
Surfing with WLAN 2h 55min  
DVD 2h 07min  
Load (maximum brightness) 1h 38min 

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Lenovo-Thinkpad-T400-6474-19G-Notebook.15861.0.html

T410, 6-cell, i7-620M, a dedicated NVIDIA NVS 3100M graphic card
Idle (without WLAN, min brightness) 4h 12min 
Surfing with WLAN 2h 35min  
DVD 2h 01min  
Load (maximum brightness) 1h 11min  

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Lenovo-Thinkpad-T410-2522-3FG-Notebook.25368.0.html

Note that the T410 was tested with a dedicated graphic card and the high performance i7 CPU series. While the T400 was tested with only integrated graphics and the P series Core 2 duo CPU with 10W lower consumption compared to the T series CPU. So the comparison is quite unfair.

It would be very interesting to see numbers on the battery life with a T410, i5-540M and with only the integrated Intel graphics. The battery life should be alot better with this configuration.

I don't think discrete graphics is available for the T410s in Europe yet but I guess new models will be released soon with this option. I noticed that it is possible to make custom configurations in the Lenovo US webshop, but not in the European/Swedish webshop.

Could anyone confirm if the lack of swhitchable graphics is a firmware/driver issue or if this feature has been removed on some models?

Regards

Mikael