Windows Phone Thoughts: Portable Power with Proporta's Laptop Battery

Potent Portable Power (...Continued)


Figure 3: The box includes the various recharging tips for major laptop brands.

Proporta should be given a nod for not using this product as an excuse to fleece customers for more money by selling power tips separately – they include tips for nine common brands of laptops, everything from Dell to Acer to Toshiba. There's also a little booklet where you can look up your laptop to find the right tip to use – strangely, the Fujitsu P7010D wasn't a model they seemed to support, even though they had dozens of other Fujitsu laptops listed, so I had to do a little guess-work to figure out which tips I needed to use. Hopefully Proporta will improve their index of laptops in the near future so customers won't have to guess.


Figure 4: The input and output ports on the Proporta Laptop Battery.

In addition to the power tips, there's also a recharging tip and a cable to connect it all. It works like this: when you want to recharge your laptop, you connect the cable to the Out port using the appropriate power tip. When you want to recharge the Proporta Laptop Battery, you need to use a different tip and connect it to the AC power adaptor for your laptop. It was a bit confusing to me at first (the Valence N-Charge battery I'm accustomed to using has a single cable with a pass-through connector) but it quickly became obvious. There's also a switch on the bottom of the battery that allows you to switch from 16 volt to 19 volts – the bottom of your laptop, or the AC adaptor for it, will have this information. Given that the Proporta Laptop Battery is $200 and a minimum of four pieces (cable, two power connectors, battery itself) I would have liked to have seen a ultra-slim neoprene case with a pouch on the front to keep it all together. I've already forgotten the cable at home once!