Features

Let There Be Light!

The Gadget Guy feels justified in starting what is, we hope, the first in a long running series of columns, with a plea of biblical proportions.

Let there be light on the train in those long tunnels between ‘oop north' (where Gadget Guy lives a life of self-imposed rural isolation - or would do if the high tech office opposite the low tech bedroom wasn't packed full with communications kit that means he is probably more ‘available' than if working office hours in some city based, partitioned and cubicled incarnation of Hades) and Kings Cross (where Gadget Guy commutes to meet the less enlightened). Well, more light than the woefully inadequate ‘it points in any direction but in front of you' variety kindly supplied by GNER.

Let there be light on the airplane flying the 11 hours across the sea to Seattle, where Gadget Guy gets his kicks checking out the intricacies of the latest release of the PocketPC OS. An OS which completely unsurprisingly is far from the ideal heart to pump life into my myriad pocketable computer devices, yet seems to dominate them with a majority holding of around 90%. My Psion netBook and Sony Clié being the only devices to escape being assimilated by the BillBorg. Well, the kind of light that doesn't annoy the big boned American gent squeezing two seats worth of ass into the one seat on your right, and his equally glandular-compromised wife who has taken the one on your left. At times like these, when you are the filling in some nightmarish economy class lard sandwich you can't help but wish that a client, PR company - anybody other than you was paying for the ticket.

Let there be light in the middle row of the conference centre so that you can actually type something during the darkness of the presentation that doesn't look like uncompiled code in the light of day outside.

Let there be light in the hotel room that isn't either a 500w Halogen floodlight affair guaranteed to induce a migraine at 50 paces, or a poorly placed 40w bulb in a bedside lamp that cannot produce any illumination in your direction without the assistance of an accomplice (honestly darling, she was just spreading a little light my way).

Let there be light anywhere that you want to work with your notebook PC but it's just too dim to actually be productive, and let's face it the light from the screen itself is not ideal for revealing detail of printed notes nor keyboard alike.

Let there be light, the Gadget Guy exclaimed, and there was light courtesy of the Matsushita Electric Works UK Limited, and their incredibly utilitarian Gadget entitled ‘PC Light'.

OK, so you can imagine the marketing meetings where they needed to create a name, a brand, an image for this thing and - well, we were let down by the prosaic fact that the man making the decision was Belgian. But my fantasies and diversions aside, the PC Light is one of those ‘does what it says on the box' products that uses the combination of a set of three highly energy efficient high intensity white LED bulbs, a stylised bulldog clip replete with 360 degrees of swivel, and half a metre of USB cabling.

Can you guess what it does yet? Yep, clip the light to the lip edging of your notebook PC, plug the USB cable into your USB port, and hey presto an illuminating experience. Drawing just 0.3w of power an average notebook PC will have its battery life shortened by a pretty irrelevant 4 minutes, and that's assuming you left it on constantly until the power barfed. Because the power is drawn from the USB port itself, no other connections or batteries are required.

No doubt, we'll get the usual smug comments from IBM ThinkPad users, many of whom already have such a light built into the lid of their smart notebooks. Since most notebooks don't have such a luxury already, and anyway, it only illuminates the keyboard, we can ignore them.

But perhaps the most pleasing aspect of this, one of the most surprisingly essential items in my Gadget Guy travel bag, is the cost. Usually, especially in the mobile business, the smaller and more practical a thing is, the bigger and more impractical the price becomes. The PC Light is so cheap at a penny under £15 (including VAT) that I bought two, and carry a spare everywhere, because I couldn't bear the thought of losing one whilst on the road.

Contact Details:

Matsushita Electric Works UK Limited

Sunrise Parkway, Linford Wood, Milton Keynes, MK14 6LF

Tel: +44 (0) 1908 350700

Email: info@mew.uk.com

www.matsushita.co.uk

Davey Winder is The Gadget Guy

(Mobile Essentials for the 21st Century Traveller)