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10-Hour PowerBook Battery

Posted by pudge on from the if-only-i-ever-left-my-house-this-might-be-useful dept.

Anonymous Coward writes "Valence has apparently caved to pressure from Mac fans and finally released iBook/TiBook compatible cabling for their N-Charge Power System. The N-Charge is a $300, 10-Hour Lithion-Ion battery that powers laptops and cell phones/pdas at the same time. The next step? How about adapters to power my miniDV camcorder?" There's also a lighter version that has about half the power, for half the price.

2 of 46 comments (clear)

  1. Electrovaya by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've been using the Electrovaya with my PBG4 for about a month. And the difference between using a high power external battery and carrying extra PB batteries is night & day. I traveled one day from Oakland to upstate New York. Watched two DVD movies, did a ton of work, had juice for my layover in Kennedy, and when I arrived in ALbany 13 hours later, I still had power. And I never had to shut down or sleep to swap batteries and keep my fingers crossed when swapping them. I wonder how this puppy compares in weight & endurance. The Electrovaya is all smooth surfaces; no hump in the middle. But I really love the phone/PDA port. And oh, the Valence is more than $100 cheaper.

  2. Using for Laptop Recording by mhbtr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There are more and more people who are using laptops to record music in the field. Often they are recording at 24/48 or 24/96. This wide bandwidth consumes huge amounts of power because of the continuous disk access (I have found that recording at 24/48 takes 1.5 times the battery power of 16/44.1). When you are recording live music in the field, you do not have the luxury of putting your laptop to sleep - you never know how long they will be playing for. In addition, you may be powering an external USB or FireWire based A/D converter/Microphone preamp - for example, the Digidesign M-Box. For all of these situations, this sounds like an ideal supplement to the internal battery. The #1 reason I have not upgraded from my FireWire PBG3 is because it has 2 battery bays and one you can swap batteries without powering down/sleeping. Lastly, a unit like this has much more of a life than your laptop. Because of the modularity of a battery and a power cable, you don't have to concern yourself with laptop upgrades - I'm psyched I have 3 batteries for my PowerBook G3, but when I do upgrade, all those batteries will be useless. With something like this, all I would need would be a new cable. Again, this is great News!!! Eytan