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.

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.