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A hot tip about Tablets, batteries, and testicles

In this weather, losing the power brick for a Motion Computing Tablet isn't just a nuisance. It's a tragedy.

I've never been what you might call short of opportunities to borrow the latest and greatest portable gear, and up till relatively recently, used to swear by the ThinkPad range. But I needed a Tablet, and fell in love (well, "rather liked" is better!) the LE1600, especially with its keyboard-lid.

The thing is, almost all notebook PCs get hot. The Motion Computing Tablet is no exception. In this weather, a hot PC on your lap is a horrible experience. And so the magic feature of that lid is the fact that it has no active electronics in it, no battery and no processor. Every other PC portable you can name, puts the processor, battery and fan on your legs.

This one, is cool, even when the temperature in London reaches 30 degrees C in June (hottest day for 99 years, I'm told).

OK, here's the personal tragedy in this story: I only have one power brick for my LE1600.

Yes, that is a tragedy. Because yesterday, after a horrific sequence of awkward occurrences involving Network Rail, I ended up in Guildford - which is not where my power brick was. So I couldn't bring the thing home. (OK, that's a complete fabrication, but the whole story is tediously stupid, and boils down to the fact that I got lost in Guildford, and left the brick behind.)

At this point, I have to praise another nice feature of the LE1600 - the extended battery. I used the machine all afternoon in a client meeting, advising  a pioneer in the e-paper industry on industry steering groups, if you want to know. And when I got home at the end of the day, without my power brick. I would, normally, have expected the notebook battery to be dead.

And that would have been the loss of a complete day.

With the extended battery you get with the LE1600, such considerations are irrelevant. With a similar extended battery on most notebooks, of course, you'd leave the lump behind. On this one, you take it with you because it's neat and compact.

And most important, when you get home and find you have no way of pumping electricity into it, it's still got another two hours, at least, in which to retrieve all your notes from yesterday.

But, sadly, not quite enough for a full day's work; which means I had to dig out my old faithful ThinkPad, and cook my thighs. And please note, that I very carefully did NOT write "cook my things."

  Tags: Testicles, laptops, overheating, and Tablet