Xps 15 portability and battery life?

Hi, I'm very strongly considering the XPS15 because it has absolutely everything I want. On the other hand, I do need to take my laptop around 5 days a week, so battery life and portability are of the utmost importance. Unfortunately going for something like the Series 9 means I will be wishing I had the XPS 1080p screen, speakers,etc once im actually sitting down. I have two questions to L502X owners...

1) How long is the battery life with just the 6 cell? I don't want to add even more bulk to this thing.

2) Just how portable is the XPS15? I don't really need to carry it around town, to cafes, across campus etc, but I also don't want it to be a pain when transporting it to and from school, friends' houses, and such.

Note: I'm not looking for a desktop replacement, this will be for out-of-home use. I realize this makes more portable laptops the smart way to go, but I'm so used to the performance of my amazing desktop rig that 768p monitors, dual core CPUs, etc are hard for me to live with.

Thanks

 

i have the 9 cell and its about 6-7 hours. 6 cell would be about 3-4 hours.
its not something i would carry around. its bulky but not as bulky as the xps17.

size difference:
View attachment 68471

 

I'm pretty happy with it. Its not super portable but it is manageable. I have a smaller Sony SZ and I prefer the Dell. I use it all the time out of the house. I'm not sure how it would handle on a plane but that might be a place that a 13 inch laptop would be preferable.

I bought it because I need the screen real estate. Anything smaller and I couldn't get 1080p.

I use a vpn over wireless on the 6 cell battery and it will last nearly 4 hrs. I wonder if it would go longer if you could turn the brightness down further. It's kind of weird but I think the minimum brightness is too high sometimes.

 

Bump for more impressions

 

You can find smaller, cheaper laptops with better batter life. I bought the 15 because I'm always on the move and do lots of Photoshop work, so a good screen was essential, even if it impacted portability a little (the 15 isn't that heavy, just really long). If all you're doing is internet browsing though, you can probably get by without 1080p. Try 720p on your current setup and see how that feels. Remember you can use alt-tab and win-tab to switch windows

 

Yea I can't stand 720p on this monitor, im running 2560x1600. On a laptop it would be okay I guess, but the more the better.

I know its smarter to get something portable but I have only three valid options that all have big issues. The Series 9 has wifi problems and mediocre battery life, the vaio z has a bad keyboard, is noisy, and has crap speakers, and finally the MBA is awesome hardware but i hate OSX and I'm not sure how well it does with W7.