7iDigital

Before we analyze how mobile your laptop is, let’s first look at some user comments that are representative of thoughts while evaluating or reviewing a laptop.

“… It is very light weight for a 15″ notebook … The battery life seems average.”

“… Portability was a very important criteria for me, … needed the ability to carry the laptop to different places. …”

“… I was also getting tired of lugging around its heavy weight ….
Therefore, reliability, a good keyboard and portability were important criteria. …”

Taking a deeper look at mobility for laptops, the following major considerations emerge:

1. Weight: The lighter a laptop, the easier it is to carry around your home or office. Components that have significant impact on the weight of a laptop are:

a) LCD Screen Size: Several users prefer a really large screen since it provides them with a bigger “real-estate” to work with. Typically users find a larger screen better to look at as well. Additionally, there are several use cases where a larger screen really helps - e.g. if a user typically uses an email client, an Instant Messaging client and a document editor (like MS Word), (s)he can keep all these applications open simultaneously, use them whenever required and thereby save on the “time required to switch between or start applications”.

But the weight of a screen is proportional to the square of its designated size (the size mentioned on screens is the diagonal size). Therefore a larger screen is significantly heavier compared to its smaller counter part. Thus a larger screen contributes very significantly to the overall weight of the laptop.

On the counter side though, smaller screens - while they result in lighter laptops - can be taxing to eyes for some people’s.

b) Battery units: To increase the time-period of battery backup, several laptops come with multiple battery bays (with an option to use one of the battery bays as an optical drive). Batteries are heavy and if they are attached to all the bays, they contribute very significantly to the weight of the laptop.

c) Type of permanent storage media: Hard disks are also a significant contributor to a laptop weight. We didn’t have an option for the type of storage medium used on a laptop until recently, but with the emergence of SSD (Solid State Drive) based storage media it is now possible to get a lighter weight option for storage. That said, SSD based storage is still very expensive and there are projections which show that these would take about 5 years to become affordable for general use.

2. Battery Backup: The longer a laptop battery lasts, the longer its users can stay “truly” mobile (without lugging around the power adapter and cables). The intrinsic capacity of batteries have gone up significantly in the last few years and that has helped. But, battery backup still remains one of the most critical parameters with regards to mobility when purchasing a laptop (users can take several actions to increase the battery life but we will discuss these in a later post).

3. Wireless Connectivity: This is also an important aspect to consider when looking for portability as far as laptops are concerned.

The modern laptops come with several connectivity options. Wifi enables users to hook up to the Internet using Ethernet based connectivity, while blue-tooth enables users to leverage their mobile-phone based GPRS connection to get onto the Internet. A third option using USB ports - where users can plug in a GPRS based data card - also enables to get connected.

4. Type of LCD screen: This is also a consideration since a wrong type can make it significantly hard to read off of laptop under outdoor conditions, and hence restricting your outdoor mobility.

In the future posts, we will cover more information on how to select a suitable laptop for your requirements.