INBOX:LAPTOPS ARE shrinking by the day, and may rapidly disappear altogether into a sort of foldable glass panel we carry around in our back pockets.
Admittedly this is the sci-fi worldview, but it is true to say that even as PCs shrink, our hands are staying the same size. So if you prefer to carry around a mouse to use that diminutive Netbook, chances are the mouse is still the same size as it was 10 years ago. As a result, we still need to plug these things in. But the other thing that is disappearing on laptops is the number of ports.
Apple has famously ditched most of them on the Mac Air. But how practical is this? What we need is a dock to plug all these wires into, before jetting off with just the laptop – and Kensington reckons it has the answer.
If you move from place to place using a laptop – as many business people do these days – there is the hassle of disconnecting all the peripherals, such as mouse, monitor, external hard drive, DVD drive and so on. That makes your portable a lot less portable. Kensington’s Notebook Expansion Dock with Video is pretty clever. You just connect it to your laptop with a single USB lead and it has lots of ports out to various peripherals.
The Dock has an expansion dock with external VGA monitor link, four powered USB ports, headphone and microphone sockets, and 10/100Mb/s Ethernet. It works with Windows XP, Vista and with Mac OS X 10.4.11 and above, although right now there is no specific support for Linux.
The wedge-shaped, 250mm-wide plastic case also doubles as a stand for your laptop, via the rubberised pad on top. This is useful, as laptops have a habit of getting pretty hot, so increasing the airflow around them can improve performance and increase battery life.
However, be warned, as this works best with a larger notebook than with a small netbook like the Asus Eee PC.
You can run the laptop screen and an external monitor as clones, so things on the laptop screen appear on the external monitor, or use them as one big desktop, dragging objects between the two. The VGA link means it will connect to a wide variety of monitors, though the absence of a DVI output means it won’t cater for very modern panel screens.
MacBook Air users – restricted to one USB port – will delight at the thought of four more via the Dock. And as this is a powered USB hub, peripherals drawing power are well supplied, and the power supply is quite compact, so you could, if you wanted to, easily run two external hard drives and two DVD drives at the same time. The audio and network ports are also handy extras and the expansion dock comes with software to manage all these.
Prices for the Kensington Notebook Expansion Dock with Video seems to vary wildly – up to €160 – but some Amazon Marketplace suppliers are selling it for about €56, which is more reasonable for this kind of device.
