The Digital Nomad gets a new toy (that lasts just that bit longer)

"I want all-day computing (wherever I am!)"
As connectivity and mobility have evolved over the last few years, a new working segment has emerged, known as the Digital Nomad. Their working space, although still with some roots in the office space, has grown into more of a virtual one. Security, VPN and connectivity technologies have all had major investment in recent years, with impressive results, however, the item that is most crucial to our work, our laptop, has always fallen at the hurdle of having a reasonable lifetime away from a power source or plug socket!

Even with more plug sockets being made available to our Digital Nomads in their virtual workspace (you can even get these on trains), we still end up playing the laptop version of Russian roulette as the figures drop on the power-source indicator (has anyone really managed to squeeze the last amp/volt out of their machine without some critical data loss?)

Today, Dell has announced its latest range of Lattitude laptops, claiming a battery-busting 19 hours of cable-free computing (thats your average day in advertising!). In a market that's expected to tip sales figures of around 1 billion over the next five years, the question is "could this be the next 'big' thing' that hardware manufacturers will be jumping on?" (over and above the current "how slim can we make it" and "how fast it is" sales pitches) to beat their competitors off the knees of the Digital Nomad?

Dell clearly considers this to be a coup for them, investing almost 2 years of research (they say almost 1 million man hours!) to get to the point where the cost to produce allows them to sell the new Lattitude computers for between $800-1400.

They have certainly been thinking a little more out of the box (or perhaps in this instance, 'away from the lap') realising that more mobile means more likely to lose their hallowed machine. They claim almost 17,000 machines were lost or left away from the office last year, and to try and resolve the nightmare of losing your laptop, they're adding more security with biometric scanning and the ability to trace and disable your machine if lost or stolen!