Sony have created a pure Ultrabook showcase with the Vaio Pro 13. It’s thin, light, powerful, stylish, touch-enabled and efficient. There’s WiDi, NFC and a fast SSD and you can add an external battery to the 37Wh pack that’s already inside.
This is the Ultrabook that’s been chosen for the South Pole expedition by The Scott Expedition
Next month, Ben Saunders and Tarka L’Herpiniere will be setting out on an 1800 mile round-journey to the South Pole covering the same route as the failed 1911/1912 journey by Captain Scott. As part of that journey they will be taking part in a media challenge that no-one has attempted before. 110 days of blogging, video editing, photo posting, Facebook updating and Tweeting using two Sony Vaio Pro 13 Ultrabooks, a few solar panels and a set of Li-Ion battery packs.
I had a chance to sit down with Ben to talk about the Ultrabooks, the extremes of the South Pole and how to make a chess board with Paint and Shortcut icons. This audio recording was made at IFA 2013.
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.
