Looking for power?

Working wirelessly sounds like a terrific idea--until you run out of power for your laptop, PDA or mobile phone. Here are 3 ideas to help you work longer while on the move:

Carry extra power: Bring along spare extended-capacity batteries for your laptop, PDA and mobile phone. But recharging them may be a hassle, and your work may get disrupted as you power down the device to swap batteries.

You can consider buying a multipurpose external battery (here's an example). Just plug your laptop, PDA and mobile phone into the external battery to charge them up. With my power-hungry Sony Vaio laptop, I was able to extend the battery life by 3 hours using the external battery.

Upgrade to Windows Vista: Windows Vista optimally uses your laptop's memory (and even your thumbdrive) to cache frequently-used data and reduce disk access, thereby saving power. Laptops running Windows XP sometimes can't sleep or hibernate properly due to buggy device drivers, so your laptop battery drains until it goes totally flat. Windows Vista promises to fix these power management problems. (Read this for the technical details.)

Get a flash memory-based hard disk: Very soon you'll be able to buy hard disks that are based on flash memory rather than magnetic platters. Flash memory is solid state, not mechanical like current hard disks, so it consumes much less power and lets you work longer. The new hard disks are much more expensive though. (Read this for more details.)

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Lee Lup Yuen

Lee Lup Yuen is passionate about mobile phones and PDAs, as he is constantly buying new gadgets and programming them in J2ME, .NET, Symbian and AppForge. He has developed commercial applications with mobile technologies like SMS, MMS, WAP, 3G video streaming and location-based services.