External Battery for Surface Pro 4? Poor battery life

I completely agree with you Dub.  Panay arrogantly stood and presented two devices that I feel have fallen completely short of what he boasted.  The Surface Book looked incredible as he taunted Apple and said his new device was faster than a MBP (come to find out he was referring to the 13" with no dedicated graphics) only to find out it was a joke of a dual core processor system with inferior storage read and write speed.  I sit here with my Surface Pro 4 with a beautiful screen and that's about it.  Storage speed is a joke topping out at +/- 300mps write speeds which is pretty lame for a 1500.00 device.  Panos is a joke, and Microsoft almost pulled me away from Apple with these devices, but I am probably returning it and waiting for the MBP because at least when apple pounds its chest about its devices, they usually perform as such.  I watch the presentation Panay made about the SB4 and Surface Pro now and just shake my head and think who was this guy trying to fool?  For a long time after the presentation, you couldn't even find out what processor and dedicated graphics card was in the surface books...and guess what...its a joke of a 1gb GPU that is a mid to low range card that wont run graphics heavy programs very well but he thinks you should spend over 2k for the device.  Read the benchmarks of the Surface Book compared to other devices in its class and it gets walked on.  And how about all of the driver and performance issues buyers encountered right off the bat with these devices...did Microsoft have anyone even use these for an extended period of time before they put them to market...but this is typical Microsoft...push out the product now and put out the fires later.  Apple is very slow to release new versions of its hardware, but you know what...when they do..it usually works pretty well without fuss.   Nothing is perfect but what a mess and a joke I think this all is.  I won't believe anything I hear Panay say ever again and I hope people start waking up and stop over paying for this stuff.

You can buy an external battery for Surface Pro 4. It is called Qi- Infinity, you can find them on ebay or amazon. It will cost you a little bit though $150 to $200 or something, and here's the catch, you might have to buy another specialty cord so you could connect the surface pro 4 to the qi-infinity which could cost you another 30 to 40 bucks. But base on the review, people say it is worth it. Or you could buy a heavy Surface Book for that extra battery juice.

Today was my first time using it for my 5 hour class. The pro 4 lasted 6 hours, give or take. Kind of dissapointed in that. Was hoping to get the entire day out of the battery.

Sorry, you just shelled out thousands for the worst battery life on the market.  The SP3 had decent battery life, the SP4 doesn't last nearly half as long, and Microsoft has done nothing to really help it, even after months of updates trying to make it work.

Like you, my SP4 is lucky to run 4 hours on battery power with WiFi connected.  That's not streaming movies or such, just ordinary business usage - Office, webmail, etc.  (

As I write this, after a full charge overnight, and less than an hour of the system sleeping, I've been using mine for just over an hour between meetings this morning, and the battery is now at 59% with under 3 hours of projected remaining battery life - that's horrible for *any* modern computer!)

As I've said in the "won't wake" thread, it appears that Intel completely botched the power management features of Skylake, and that Microsoft believed that the new ultra-low-power "SP0" sleep feature of Skylake could be relied upon.  As a result, MS slashed the size of the battery in the SP3 (which is the main reason it's thinner than the SP3), thinking that the power savings would let them get away with less battery.  Unfortunately, the low-power state is extremely unstable in some circumstances, so they aren't able to leverage it as much as expected, resulting in very poor battery life.  (This instability is worst in a refusal to wake after being asleep for more than a short time, leaving a forced power-off/reboot as the only way out.  This doesn't affect everyone, but if you're one of the unlucky ones, it means several lost minutes nearly every time you open the type cover or press the power button to try to wake it up.)

Put simply, Microsoft and Intel have completely and utterly failed to deliver on their promises of best-in-class power use, and instead, are delivering worst-in-class performance.  Here's a reminder of their promise:

Microsoft does not make an external battery, sorry.

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Barb

Windows Experience MVP

My Blog - http://digitalmediaphile.com/

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