I was home, under the weather the last three days so I was able to take a close look at a replacement battery for my G4 TiBook. It's from Newer Technology, the NuPower Ti 4800mAH battery. The replacement battery is distributed by Other World Computing. The NuPower is a 4800mAH Lithium-Ion battery with the highest capacity every produced for the TiBooks, 71 watt-hours. Replacement batteries from Apple are 61 watt-hours. Here is a list with the increased battery power for the Ti-Book batteries it replaces:

• 42% more capacity than the Apple original battery that shipped with the PowerBook G4 Titanium 400/500MHz models (50 Watt Hour original battery)
• 28% more capacity than the battery Apple shipped with the PowerBook G4 TitaniumG4 550/667/800MHz models (55.3 Watt Hour original battery)
• 16% more capacity than the battery Apple shipped with the PowerBook G4 Titanium G4 867MHz & 1GHz (61 Watt Hour original battery).
• The cost is $149.99.

Let's look at how it fared in my hands-on testing.First let me explain how I use my Ti-Book and the current state of my original battery. I have an 800 Mhz G4 15 inch TiBook. It's almost 2 years old and I use it more as a desktop replacement then I do as a traveling, portable laptop. More then 90% of the time it's plugged in to an AC adaptor and stays on for several days at a time. About twice a month I try to unplug it and run the battery down and recharge it back up, but I understand I am not using the correct method to keep my battery at an optimal level. Therefore, after 2 years, I find that the longest period of time my original battery will last is about one hour and 30 minutes. As I said, I normally do not let my laptop sleep, and am testing while constantly running applications as I would normally. I installed the NuPower 4800mAH and as instructed, left my TiBook plugged in for at least 12 hours overnight. I then unplugged it and left the battery drain until the TiBook went into hibernation from low battery. I repeated several more times and then started to test. I fully charged and drained the battery whle using it as I normally would, no sleep mode, no screen darkening, applications being opened and closed and switching users. The results were a steady 3 hours of battery life. That was double my current battery life from the original.

If memory serves me, I was getting between 2 and 2 and one half hours of battery life when the TiBook was new (Using it the same way). Therefore, I feel I am getting an extra half, to a full hour more then I would get from a new Apple replacement 61 hour battery. The Apple replacements cost $129.00 while the NuPower is $149.99. For the road warrior this extra time will be worth the extra $20, but each of us will need to make that decision for ourselves depending on how we use our TiBooks.