By Andrew Liszewski
If you’ve permanently made the move to a laptop over a desktop PC, you’ve probably had to give up a few conveniences like ample storage with room for additional hard drives and copious amounts of USB and other ports. But the DeskBook Pro dock from Zemno will give you all of that back, for the price of another reasonably equipped notebook. (Windows-based of course.) As you can see in the product shots it’s designed to complement and match an aluminum MacBook, but it can be used with pretty much any notebook as long as its footprint isn’t too large.
But what does it give you? Well for starters it’s got 7 USB ports, 3 Firewire 800 ports, 1 Firewire 400 port, 1 DVI output, 1 ESATA data connection, 1 ESATA power connection, stereo audio in & out and even a built-in multi-format memory card reader. It’s also got a couple of removable ‘ModBays’ in the front which can be filled with extra hard drives, extra batteries (that only power the dock itself) and eventually even devices like your iPod. While it’s not pictured, I’m assuming there is some cabling that needs to be run including both USB and Firewire, so you’ll need one of the newer FW-equipped MacBooks to really take advantage of the dock. All-in-all it doesn’t look too shabby, were it not for the unfortunate $599.99 price tag. Not to mention the extra $179.99 for the optional 500GB ModBay hard drive, or the $149.99 for the ModBay battery module.
[ Zemno DeskBook Pro Dock ] VIA [ Wired Gadget Lab ]
Hum.. it might be a dumb question, but how do you connect your laptop to the docking station?
The main advantage with proprietary docking stations is that once you reach your desk, you just have to plug your computer in, and not a kajillion cables. However if you have to connect the laptop to the docking station by said cables, I fail to understand the benefit with respect to a messy, non-docking-station solution.