Hasta La Gadget!

Reports hit yesterday that Dell had shipped Mini 9 reviewers a 32Wh battery while shorting consumers with an undersized 24Wh battery. Dell has since denied the claims, and further testing sides with Dell, too.

According to a spokesperson,

Mini 9 is configured with and has never shipped with anything but 32WH batteries. A third party test program being used in the field doesn’t properly program every vendor’s battery to report power (versus current) capabilities, and so the utility is not properly reporting the actual battery capacity. We have confirmed this and all packs are 4-cell 32Whr, and will deliver more than 4 hours of battery life in typical usage.

Indeed, the original forum poster even admitted that the “24Wh” battery actually had a longer life span than their “32Wh” version. And both batteries exceeded four hours of usage.

So between Dell’s outright denial and further testing by forum members, it looks like this rumor was smashed. Whether or not we have a real explanation as to the odd discrepancies in testing software, as long as it’s not screwing with battery life, I really couldn’t care less.