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Executive Editor
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 29,160
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Portable Power with Proporta's Laptop Battery
Product Category: External battery
Manufacturer: Proporta
Where to Buy: Proporta
Price: $195.95 USD
System Requirements: Will work with a variety of laptops and USB powered devices.
Specifications: 6000 mAH Lithium Polymer battery, 1.3 pounds, support 16 and 19 volt laptops, almost any 5v USB device.
Pros:- Superb design;
- Has USB port for recharging 5 volt USB devices;
- Includes tips for a variety of laptops.
Cons:- 6000 mAH may not be enough for all laptops;
- Recharging your laptop may mean no power for other devices;
- No carrying case.
Summary:
The Proporta Laptop Battery, despite its dull name, is an exciting product. Proporta took a 6000 mAH Lithium Polymer battery, wrapped it in a gorgeous aluminum design, added a USB power, bundled in tips for every popular laptop brand on the market, and released it all for $199 USD. This is a great product worthy of adding to any road-warrior's kit - even if you don't travel with a laptop and just want a lot of portable power for your USB devices.
Read on for the full review!
Potent Portable Power
Portable batteries, once a geeky oddity, have become more common in the past few years mostly due to a combination of mainstream brands (such as APC and Kensington) realizing that mobile users need a power boost, and prices dropping to the point where smaller vendors can release their own versions of this product. Proporta is one such vendor long known for their PDA accessories and cases, they've been branching out into new types of accessories for laptops, MP3 players, and other digital devices. The Proporta Laptop battery is one of their brand new products, selling for $199 USD and providing 6000 mAH of power for laptops or other devices from its Lithium Polymer battery. The built-in USB port kicks out 5 volts of power, sufficient to recharge most devices. Made of aluminum, the battery is 220mm (8.7 inches) x 130mm (5.1 inches) x 15mm (0.6 inches) in size and weighs in at 600g (1.3 pounds). That's quite small and light for a portable laptop battery most are bigger and heavier.
Figure 1: The packaging is fairly plain, not measuring up to the design of the battery itself.
Figure 2: This battery has got the looks.
The machined aluminum looks fantastic the Proporta Laptop Battery looks more like modern art than a geeky power tool. Sadly, they don't seem to have perfected the creation of the shell the review unit they sent me doesn't sit evenly on a flat surface: one corner is a few millimetres higher than the opposite corner. Perhaps mine was damaged in transit (they shipped it from the UK to Canada in an envelope, not a box), but regardless, it was unfortunate to see such a flaw in a design that is otherwise outstanding. There's an LED indicator on the top of the battery that, when pressed, will give you a one pip to five pip measurement of remaining power. This is also the button you need to press to turn on USB charging I'm not sure why this isn't automatic when a USB device is connected.
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!
Sufficient Power? That Depends
The 6000 mAH battery is sufficient to power a variety of devices, but this will vary widely based on the type of laptop you're connecting it to. For instance, my Fujitsu P7010D is a small laptop with a 10.6" screen and a 4800 mAH primary battery that gave me around six hours of run time when it was brand new (it's down to about five hours now). An electrical engineer could explain this better than I can, but there's always efficiency lost when one battery charges another. As a test, I ran my 4800 mAH battery completely flat, and then connected the 6000 mAH Proporta Laptop Battery to it. I was expecting it to recharge the 4800 mAH battery and have some juice left over (1200 mAH) to recharge a device or two. After several hours I found that my Fujitsu laptop was back up to 100% power, but the Proporta battery was completely dead with nary a mAH left to recharge anything else. My crude method of measurement (and I use that term loosely) gives us about 20% lost power, making the Proporta battery 80% efficient. I have no idea how that compares to other products of this type on the market, but it's something to be aware of.
Realistically, most people are going to use the Proporta battery to top-up a partially depleted laptop battery, or use it as a primary power source until depleted then switch over to their laptop battery. My testing method is a worst-case emergency scenario. On the plus side, I was away for a six days and used it to recharge my HTC Touch from 50% power three times and it only used one pip of power. You can finally leave behind the AC power bricks for all your USB devices assuming they charge via USB that is (curse you Motorola for putting a miniUSB connector on my wife's KRZR but not letting it recharge without your "special" AC power adaptor).
Figure 5: There's my Zune (Colorware customized and pathetically fragile now because of it) getting juiced by the Proporta Laptop Battery.
So what does this mean to you then? If you have a laptop with a battery around 5000 mAH, the Proporta Laptop Battery will give you one full recharge but leave nothing for any of your other USB-based devices. This flies in the face of their product page which claims "recharge your laptop for prolonged use or several emergency charges" perhaps several partial charges, but certainly not full charges unless the laptop has an anemic 2000 mAH battery. If you have a laptop such as mine with a primary (4800 mAH) and secondary battery (2300 mAH), the Proporta battery won't even be able to provide one full charge. When I recharged my laptop with both batteries in, I got about 75% charges on each battery (16% power efficiency loss, which is about right). Given that I can get around 10 hours of run time with both batteries in my laptop, that means with the Proporta battery connected I could get around 17 hours enough for all but the longest of flights.
Postlude Ponderings
If it sounds like I'm not a fan of this product, that's not the case at all while I wish Proporta would release something with slightly bigger capacity (say, 8000 mAH), the current product is so nicely designed that I wouldn't want to travel without it. The ability to recharge a variety of devices via USB is absolutely fantastic and despite what the Proporta product page says, my Microsoft Zune charges just fine, as long as I use the official Zune USB cable. The combination of a sub-$200 price with tips for an assortment of laptops makes this a much better deal than something like the Valence N-Charge which has a higher base price and the added restriction of requiring a $50 accessory for every type of laptop you want to connect (and no USB port I practically begged them to add one when I reviewed it in 2006). I see no reason to carry my N-Charge any longer, especially as I'm switching laptops (from my Fujitsu P7010D to a Dell XPS M1330 - if the damn thing ever ships!) and I have everything I need already included with the Proporta Laptop Battery. This is a highly useful, functional product that does exactly what it's supposed to do.
Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online enthusiast communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, and his mostly obedient dog. He's obsessed with battery life. Can you tell?
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