Digital Home Thoughts: Valance N-Charge VNC130 External Laptop Battery Reviewed

I Admit It, I Have A Battery Fetish
Battery life. If you use any sort of electronic device – camera, audio player, laptop, cell phone, PDA – battery life is something that you think about...especially if your device is completely dead. I was told by a mobile device product designer that battery life has been increasing by 8% per year over the past several years, and he seemed to think that was pretty great news. It might be, but I certainly don't feel like my mobile devices last long enough on a charge. We need exponential battery growth – like a laptop going from lasting 6 hours to lasting 60 hours on a single charge – before we can breathe easy about battery life and not have to think about it so much.

The N-Charge from Valance aims to change that, at least for laptop owners, by providing a portable battery that gives you a power boost when you're away from a wall socket. Battery life is the overriding concern for me when I look at laptops – in fact, my past two small laptops have been Fujitsu P series (5000 and 7000) units for one main reason: the optical bay can be removed and replaced with a second battery, and with two batteries the P series laptops can get 10 to 11 hours of battery life on a single charge. For a small and light laptop whose primary purpose is email, writing, and Web access, battery life is what matters to me most.

The Battery Basics
I've seen people with those big, flat batteries before, but I'd never gotten around to really looking seriously at them until recently. After some research looking at the different brands out there, I decided that the N-Charge products from Valance Technology looked the most promising. The N-Charge products use a system Valance calls Saphion, which incorporates phosphate based cathode material instead of the cobalt-oxide cathode material that traditional Lithium Ion batteries use. What that means to the product is higher performance, more safe and stable chemistry, long life cycle with more charge/discharges, and a flexible form-factor. I looked at the VNC-130, which is their most heavy-duty battery. It weighs in at 3 pounds, making it nearly as heavy as my laptop. It's about 0.5 inches thick, 11.8 inches wide, and 9 inches tall. There's a connection port on the top, with a proprietary connector that links into the battery.

Two cables come out the removable connector – one end plugs into the laptop, and one end accepts AC power from the laptop's power supply. There are no removable tips – you need to purchase a cable that will only work with your make/model of laptop (at $49.99 a pop - ouch!). There's also no way to recharge the N-Charge from a wall socket unless you have the laptop's power AC power supply with you. There's button on the top of the N-Charge that, when pressed, gives you a five-bar readout of the power level on the battery. This is very useful, as it gives you a rough idea of how much juice is left in the battery. The VNC-130 boasts 120 to 130 Wh (watt hours) of power, takes 3-4 hours to recharge from zero, has a capacity of 10 amp hours, and has a high-power port voltage of 16 to 24 volts DC. It will power any laptop up to 15.4 inch screen – 17 inch screen laptops tend to require too much power (even my Pentium 4 M-based Fujitsu N6220). That's a lot of techno-babble – so does this thing actually work? In a word: yes.