Digital Home Thoughts: Portable Power with Proporta's Laptop Battery

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.