Does Your Motorcycle Need An Onboard Laptop?
With digital cell phone and tablet computer technology advancing at lightning speed, it might be time to consider what you need in the way of communications devices on your bike.
If you have to travel with a laptop, and it can be really handy if you’re a writer or a photographer, here are some things to consider.
The critical thing that will kill your laptop stone dead in transit on a motorcycle is vibration. Vibration may shake parts loose in your device and break a variety of crucial, often delicate connections. The main reason hard drives fail? The moving parts associated with a hard drive. Modern hard drives have two or more platters stacked on top of each other with an arm that moves along the surface of the disc. Are these things delicate? You bet they are. The space between the arm heads and the platters is measured in thousandths of an inch – and sometimes in microns.
When the orientation the platter’s rotation is changed abruptly, the arm and the spinning platters can collide, and if the platters get scratched at all you’re going to get the laptop equivalent of a motorcycle tire failure – complete hard drive failure.
So how can you avoid the worst possible malfunction a computer can suffer?
Make absolutely certain your laptop is turned off while your bike is in motion. When the laptop is turned off, if the heads and arms do touch the platters, the chances are minimized of the heads and arms causing those dastardly scratches.
Riders have begun equipping their machines with tablet computers for GPS navigation, weather forecasts, traffic reports, and other useful purposes like image storage. While phones now have a variety of those capabilities, they don’t yet seem to have all the computing power you might want on a long working trip.
Fear not, you have some relatively small and portable options.
Manufacturers now make tough-as-nails tablets like the Panasonic Tough Pad.
Pros
- Tested in horrific weather and water and sand proof.
- Integrated 4G support, high speed wireless broadband capable.
- You can just replace faulty battery cells and not the entire battery.
- Big screen and GPS support, never get lost!
Cons
- Way, way too much money if you’re not extremely well-heeled – they cost approximately $1300.
- It is big compared to a 7″ tablets, but that can be a good thing as well.
Panasonic Toughpad Tech Specs
- 1.2 GHz Processor (Dual Core)
- Android 3.2 Honeycomb
- Highly robust (IP65 and MIL-STD-810G Certified)
- Camera – 2MP front and 5MP rear
- Display 10.1” XGA LED
- Inbuilt 4G – WiMax or 3G support (optional)
- Highly enhance Daylight readable screen
- 1GB RAM, 16 GB Flash
- GPS receiver, Wi-Fi Hotspot router
- Micro USB 2.0, Micro SD support
- Three-Year Warranty
Whether you ride a sport bike or an American cruiser, your insurance needs can get complicated. If you travel long distances, you’re going to need to take along delicate items like cameras, cell phones and laptops, and you need to make sure your motorcycle insurance covers those items in the event they’re damaged.
So what do you do? You check this out:
