Handtops, UMPC - External Battery Charger Needed... Again! -

When will they catch on?

It has been said over and over that the latest crop of Handtops do not have sufficient battery time… 2 – 3 hours just isn’t enough. I think Cnet even gave the UX (in their review) a drop of a couple points on the 1-10 scale due to this one drawback alone.

Now I believe the Handtop manufactures are very much aware of this crippling issue and simply address it by offering extra and/or expanded batteries for sale. I would think they are very pleased to sell us these extra batteries because it also adds to their sales revenue and is a means by which they can answer our cry of more needed power.

Now the idea is, if we buy a second battery (or even a third) we would necessarily want to have that spare battery charged and ready to go when the first battery goes low… Right?

So how are you going to do this and keep this cycle maintained if you don’t have an External Charger/Adaptor to use?

To further my point…We had to wait over a year before OQO released/offered for sale a simple little (proprietary) adaptor by which we could charge our spare battery(s) outside the Model 01.

I also ask, why did this take so long to come about when it should’ve been available from the day that the spare batteries went on sale.

Well, here we are now facing the very same problem when buying the new UX… right?

Unless I missed it, since I didn’t actually receive my UX180 yet. I don’t see that Sony is offering any means to do this either.

So why is it that these brilliant engineers can’t understand the need for a means to charge a battery while using the other? And, that this offering should really be available as part of the accessory line from day one, right along side the extra battery that goes up for sale.

FWIW I’ll give credit to Motorola by which I’ve been spoiled now for almost 10 yrs. Going all the way back to when they first offered extra batteries for their Startac series of cell phones. They understood this problem of a need to have a freshly charged battery available when the first one ran out.

They made available in their accessory line up a stand alone battery charger (Desktop Charger). I could not only charge the extra battery independently of the phone but I could also plug in the entire phone (with it’s on board battery) to charge it too. Both batteries could be charging overnight when the need arose… this was great!

I just don’t understand now how in the 21st century we don’t have this foreknowledge being applied to the current Handtops industry because the same problem seem to exist for them. There appears to be a paradigm that doesn’t allow the designers and marketers to see this needed component till an after fact. In other words, they’ll only deal with the issue later (than sooner) once customer demand has reached a sufficient rant/need for them to design and offer an external adaptor.

So I'll also finish with this question… do you want (or need) an external battery charger for your UX?