Starting in October The Scott Expedition is aiming to re-trace the route taken by Robert Scott on his 1911/12 journey to the South Pole. He made it, but never quite made it back and so the 1800 mile round trip remains unfinished.
Ben Saunders and team-mate Tarka L’Herpiniere will clearly have some challenges and I won’t attempt to detail the obvious ones but less obvious is the need for non-safety-related communication. Sponsors need pictures, videos, webcasts, social network feedback and tracking so the requirements for electronic equipment are challenging. Intel are sponsoring the team with a Sony Vaio Pro Ultrabook based on Haswell (the latest Core processor) and everything will be charged via sunlight.
I’m very interested in Solar-powered computing (to the point where I did my own 500km journey in 2007 and run a separate blog on solar mobile computing) and ultra mobile computing so as this project also combines the use of Ultrabooks, I’ll be following it closely. More detail on the kit and method below.
In an article over at Forbes we learn that the team will use a single 62W foldable panel and two 51Wh Li-Ion battery packs (from Ape Technology – probably the same as these.) In my opinion, that’s tight, possibly too tight.
Testing power usage on Haswell Ultrabooks is difficult due to the huge range of scenarios that the next generation Ultrabooks have. They’ll stream music for days and yet if you try to do too much gaming on them, you might be out of juice in as little as two hours. What we can say though, without a shadow of a doubt, is that the battery life on Haswell Ultrabooks, compared to Ivy Bridge Ultrabooks is hugely improved. We’ve got a Dell XPS 12 with Haswell here that proves it.
At 699 Euro, the Haswell-based Lenovo Ideapad U330 is the cheapest Haswell Ultrabook on the market right now. It’s now available to order and shipping, at least in Germany. If you’re not into touch, there’s a non-touch version (not a true 2013 Ultrabook but up to 2012 Ultrabook specs) available for 599 Euro.
So far as we can tell, Sony is the first vendor to bring the next generation of Haswell Ultrabooks to market. The Vaio Duo 13 and Vaio Pro are available today!
We were all waiting for the evolution of the Samsung Series 9 and so here it is and it includes both Intel and AMD/ The Samsung ATIV Book 9 Plus and Samsung ATIV book 9 Lite.
It’s going to be a confusing year for Ultrabook graphics as Haswell feeds-in. Not only are we still seeing sales of Sandy Bridge 2nd-gen Core-based Ultrabooks [can we take these out of the Ultrabook arena please, Intel?] but the new 4th-Gen Ultrabooks will be coming with a wider range of GPU options than ever before. HD 4200, HD 4400, HD 5000 and HD 5100 (Intel Iris) GPUs are listed. Today we get the first indicators of performance on the HD4xxx range with HD5xxxx performance indicators likely in the next 24hrs thanks to a new Apple MacBook Air that was launched yesterday.
Fujitsu has introduced the Lifebook UH90 Ultrabook which comes with a Haswell processor, is 15.5mm thick, has a gorgeous red finish and features a stunning 3200 x 1800 screen resolution.
Sure, we can all get an Ultrabook to run for 10hrs. I did it myself recently when I put a Samsung through a typing test but how about being online and running web apps? Running the web through a browser is one of the most taxing things you can do to a laptop so seeing 9.5hrs runtime in a MobileMark2012 test is something worth checking out, in 60 seconds with a timelapse video. Haswell is doing the business.
