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Solar Technology Free Loader

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Enough sunlight falls onto Britain in less than 45 minutes to supply the nation's energy needs for an entire year.

We're generations away from being able to tap into a significant part of that, so a little bit of free electricity always appeals.

The bad news sets in almost immediately. You can't charge devices directly - the solar panels can't deliver a charge fast enough, apparently - and so you first have to charge the Free Loader's internal battery, then dump that power to your device.

A struggle to charge

Next, charging times. You can charge it over USB - fast enough to be usable - but charging using the power of the sun takes much longer.

The manual says that a day in full sun is enough to charge the battery, but this triples when you keep it behind glass, whose UV filters cut down the potential energy, and you have to contend with cloudy days, too.

Unlike charging over USB, there's no way to know when the battery is charged. Three different LEDs light and change colour to inform you of charging status, but the system is rather clunky.

Use with your iPhone

A fully charged battery is able to supply a fair bit of power; it charged an iPhone halfway, giving 2 hours, 20 mins of talk time.

It includes charging adaptors for the iPod (up to 60GB), Nintendo DS Lite, LG Chocolate series, Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson mobiles, the PSP, Tom Tom and digital cameras, and anything that charges over USB; extra connection tips are available.

After a full week of charging on a windowsill in early spring, it was only juiced up enough to provide 50 minutes of iPhone talk time. Remember, though, that the iPhone is a complex beast; a little entry-level Nokia would probably get more.

The Free Loader, then, is cheap enough for it to be a handy source of emergency power on your car's dashboard, but don't expect to sever your connection to the national grid.

Tsunami e-DATA 2500

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The hard disk in a MacBook is easy to replace, but what do you do with the old drive?

Rather than sell it on eBay or throw it away, you can buy a cheap enclosure and suddenly you've gained an extra portable drive.

This model from Tsunami looks sharp, and while the industrial design may not be to all tastes, the screws are easy to access.

They can get snagged and the controller board adds bulk, but it's handy if you need to swap disks around with any frequency. This makes installation a breeze, while two blue LEDs shine through the transparent case to display power and activity.

A versatile drive

Annoyingly, however, the e-DATA 2500 was a bit choosy about what USB cables it used.

Supplied with a double-headed cable, it was happy to bus-power with just one plug connected, but refused to mount with other cables.

It's cheap, easy to use and looks the part, though, so it gets our thumbs up.

Gear4 IceBox

1208342050

To protect iPhones, Apple decided to use glass screens instead of the usual iPod plastic, so scratch-resistant cases and sleeves such as this IceBox from Gear4 are a hard sell.

The IceBox wraps an iPhone in hard plastic but provides easy access to the controls and ports. There is nothing about the design that interferes with the iPhone controls; you can easily command the touchscreen through the plastic sheath.

A tight squeeze

One problem with the IceBox is the quality of the fit. It took a good few attempts and a bit of chin-scratching to make the case close properly around the iPhone. The lack of a gap between the sliding shoe and the iPhone body means a tight fit.

Even when properly aligned the case still doesn't sit quite flush, with one half of the design protruding a lip over the other. It's only one millimetre or so of raised plastic, but you can feel the edge.

The price is low, as with all Gear4 releases, but the quality isn't top-notch, which makes this a budget offering, at best.

Gear4 Airzone FM dock

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This FM transmitter is an update to Gear4's previous Airzone transmitter.

It's kept its low price and has done away with the need for an AAA battery, running instead on the iPod's power. Unfortunately a charging cable doesn't come in the box, but one is available as an optional extra.

Radio for your iPod

The signal strength and ease of tuning were both acceptable. You get four preset channels, down from six on its predecessor, but a better LED display.

Critically, the dial moves in increments of 0.1MHz so you can get a precise frequency. It will also broadcast a signal on any frequency from 87.6 to 107.9, which means you can avoid radio station chatter by tuning the signal below the UK's 88.1 FM radio spectrum starting point, if you car or home stereo allows.

You can also beam the iPod signal to your hi-fi, thereby turning the iPod into a remote.

Build quality could be improved but generally we liked it.

Griffin Evolve

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Evolve. That’s a good name for these speakers.

Gone are the speaker cables; instead, you get a base unit that beams music to the speaker boxes wirelessly.

Two three-inch aerials do the beaming. Thanks to this clever development, you can take these speakers (either one or both) into the kitchen with you, then pick a speaker up and carry it into the garden – anywhere, in fact, within 150 feet of the base unit.

Blare you iPod anywhere

It’s a very flexible way to spread music around your house, and the first time we’ve seen this technology properly executed. You dock your iPod in the base and use a remote to browse tracks.

The remote is very simple, and doesn’t have a screen, but worked well at basic browsing. Speaker signal reception didn’t appear to deteriorate the further we walked away from the base unit.

We walked over 120 feet from it and then stood behind a wall before we could just start to hear the signal breaking. That seemed reasonable. We didn’t notice any network chatter during the test.

Well built speakers

The speakers are magnetically shielded too, which protects them from network chatter. These speakers charge on a three-pronged metal tray. Each can take a ten-hour charge, and to save power they will automatically switch off if they don’t get any music in an hour.

There’s no way to discern whether the speakers are nearly empty or nearly full, but LEDs let you know when they are completely full (green) or completely empty (red). Either speaker can be the left or right channel.

You can also add extra speakers to the unit, which share the same network. The connections are generous. You get twin RCA ports for taking an audio signal into the back of the base station.

A further set of audio- out RCA jacks, including video- out, are there in case you want to tack the unit onto a home entertainment centre. There’s also S-Video out. Sadly, you don’t get a USB port for syncing with a Mac, nor a 3.5mm jack for taking a signal from an iPod shuffle.

Disappointing audio

On the downside, the sound quality was tinny. We put this down to the acrylic housing of the speakers and we suspect that if wood were used instead then a richer, deeper sound would have been produced.

On the remote is an EQ button, which goes some way to rounding out the sound. At £154, we suspect that most people will be happy with this product.

This is the first time a wireless speaker set has impressed us as a viable product, and the convenience is undeniable.

Gear4 WorldTour V2

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WorldTour is a box full of travel plugs bundled with a USB adaptor and two USB ports that will suck juice from sockets wherever you may roam.

You get four socket adaptors in the box covering the types you will need in the UK, Europe, US and Australia.

Cheap and competent

The set worked fine for us. You slot the adaptors in and out of the USB adaptor to provide a charging platform for up to two USB devices.

An iPod-charging cable comes in the box, in case you left yours on the beach, which is a nice bonus. The only problem that might be a deal-breaker is the amount of space the kit takes up in a bag, which is far more than one of those universal plug adaptors.

The price, as with all Gear4 gadgetry, is bargain basement, but it works as advertised and was happily charging an iPhone and iPod simultaneously during our test.

Altec Lansing inMotion iM7

tech.co.uk staff — 1206089412

When a piece of hardware is given a name containing the word 'motion', you tend to think it's able to be, you know, carried around a bit. To the beach perhaps. Or the park. And when you first pick it up, this scenario doesn't seem too outlandish.

Okay, so it's essentially a souped-up boom box, but it's certainly no bigger than a tape deck like those carried around New York streets in 1980s films. True, the carry handle isn't ideal; you'll need to get a firm grip to stop the boom box slipping off your hand. But, unfortunately, the inMotion has a far greater issue than that: power.

At home, you can use the mains. But out and about, juice is a little more difficult to obtain. Just ask Marty McFly. Mind you, that's why batteries were invented. And yes, the inMotion takes batteries. But the problem is it takes rather a lot of them. Eight to be precise.

Eight! And there's a further problem - they're D size! (That's the really, really big ones.) So T. Hmm. Suddenly portability seems a less attractive option. In fact, you'll probably need to drive your car to the park to drop it off before you can enjoy your picnic.

The sound isn't the best we've heard (see the i-deck on the next page), while the distortion from even a little too much bass is terrible. The remote was rather unresponsive, too. But credit is due for having a separate volume control rather than relying on the iPod's controls.

The iM7 works with bottomdock iPods and iPod minis (an adaptor for minis is included). The panel you slot your iPod into has a clever soft-eject mechanism. The iPod doesn't fit that snugly in the slot, though. And for the best part of £200, there are far better options for your money - it's not quite the finished article in our eyes. Dan Grabham

Altec Lansing iM7

tech.co.uk staff — 1205590351

The iM7 instantly reminds us of a classic boom box design, except that in the place of a twin cassette deck you get a spring-loaded iPod-dock loading bay that smoothly flips out with a push and click. A wheel clamp then tightens the grip on the iPod, setting things firmly in place for travelling.

The 'iM' in the model name stands for inMotion, and true to form the speaker travels well. Two bays of 4D batteries access underneath the iPod tray mean you can take the iM7 out and about with ease. A rubber-lined handgrip helps things further.

A wireless remote parks into a slot around the back of the speaker above a generous rank of input and output audio ports.

Among these there's a 3.5mm audio input, an output for headphones, a remote with extra treble and bass controls, and both an S-Video and composite out port so you can play a video feed from a video iPod through a compatible TV with the sound pumping out of the iM7.

Boom

And it does pump. This would be a great unit for the party-minded, people who love a lusty bass.

The bass is pretty full-on, powered by a sideways poised 4-inch subwoofer which can actually be quite overpowering, even on bass-light acoustic melodies like Nick Drake's Time Has Told Me or Dylan's Maggie's Farm.

It lacks the tightness or detail of the Apple Hi-Fi or warmth of the SoundDock, but at nearly £100 less than either, it's still perfectly acceptable, and you can always turn the bass down using the remote.

Treble and bass controls are not an option on the other two, except through an iPod EQ setting.

With the bass minimised you get a pretty balanced output from the iM7, together with solidity and sounds that can travel. James Ellerbeck

Apple iPod Camera Connector

tech.co.uk staff — 1205066872

The iPod photo was a great idea, but it had one major flaw: unlike other media storage devices, there was no way to directly import images from your camera or media card.

With Apple's £19 iPod Camera Connector, this shortcoming has been addressed - although not in a terribly elegant or efficient way if you prefer to shoot your digital images in RAW mode.

At the time of going to press, Apple listed 83 cameras compatible with this at www. apple.com/ipod/compatibility/ cameraconnector.html. Moving your images from one of them to your iPod photo is simplicity itself.

Just insert one end of the Camera Connector into your iPod's docking slot, then connect your camera's USB cable into the USB slot on the other end of the Camera Connector. A couple of seconds later, your iPod will display the number of photos in your camera and the total size of the import. All you have to do is select Import, click your iPod's central selection button, and sit back while import begins.

We tested the Connector with a Nikon D70 and a 1GB SanDisk Ultra II CompactFlash card. Importing a card filled with 182 RAW files took just under half an hour; 180 RAW-plus-JPEG image pairs took the same amount of time; 572 JPEGs at Normal resolution took a bit over 45 minutes. It's not exactly speedy

When the import process is finally complete you'll be offered two choices: Done or Erase Card. Choose Done, and a list of what you've just imported will roll alongside other imported rolls. Select a roll, and you're given the option to Browse that roll or Delete it. Unfortunately, you can only delete an entire roll, not individual images - annoying.

Image-selection

Select Browse, and you're presented with the iPod photo's five-by-five microthumbnail image-selection screen, where you can select an image for viewing or start a slideshow using the settings you've defined in Photos > Slideshow Settings, including your choice of backing music.

If you've shot your images in RAW-only mode, the microthumbnails show up as circles with the word 'RAW' inside. Select one of them for viewing and an error message pops up: "This photo format cannot be viewed on iPod". It then instructs you to connect your iPod to your computer and synchronise it with iTunes.

Here's where things start to get a bit less intuitive. When you dock your iPod and open iPhoto, you're presented with a pane that displays an image of an iPod photo and Ready To Import Items. If you've shot in RAWplus- JPEG mode on your camera, that number is double your actual exposures. Click the Import button, and the images are displayed during import.

iPhoto then displays the Library with the uploaded photos appended; RAW photos are given a keyword of 'Raw'. If you now check in your Mac's user name/Pictures/iPhoto Library, you'll find a dated folder containing the JPEGs you imported; your NEFs are in a nested Originals folder.

However, iPhoto not only keeps the JPEGs of the RAW-plus-JPEG pairing, it also creates JPEG duplicates of the RAWs and keeps them with the original JPEGs - each image appears twice in the iPhoto Library. Confused? So were we!

To get the images into your iPod photo's Photo Library, launch iTunes and dock your iPod photo; iTunes will update it with the images you imported into iPhoto. If you shot in RAWplus- JPEG mode, the original JPEGs and those made from NEFs appear in the iPod photo's Photo Library; originals in Photo Import > Roll are untouched and must be deleted manually.

Glad we got that sorted out. Rik Myslewski

Logitech mm50

tech.co.uk staff — 1204901739

Anyone who has invested in tiny satellite speaker systems will know that good sound doesn't necessarily have to come only from big speakers.

This iPod speaker is a case in point. It looks much like any iPod speaker unit, but churns out a great punch that made us sit and up and take notice right out of the box.

Our bright pop choice, the Black Eyed Peas' Hey Mama, sings through the speakers. Our classical pick, Paganini's Capricci Op. 1, played very well too. Reggae and dance had no real bass area to revel in really, but out of all the speakers, only the £200 models had a more detailed delivery.

Features are decent: there's a remote; it runs on its own rechargeable battery unit, or from the mains; there's an aux line-in jack; it's lightweight and comes with an elegant and protective zip-up travel case.

Logitech says that you can get ten hours of playback from one full charge, which proved to be pretty accurate.

Solid feel

Input options are a bit light but at least there's an aux input, so it could double as a desktop speaker for your Mac, too. The build is great, everything feels solid.

We, ahem, accidentally dropped it while testing and it fell about two feet on to a wooden floor. It suffered no dings, nor did it pick up any worrying rattles. The speakers are covered by tough metal grills to protect them, and the two foldout stands around the back are strongly put together.

At a price of only £70, this model is at the low end of our Group Test, but it impressed us with its all-round ability and comes with a very clear and engaging sound.

We therefore recommend the mm50 to anyone looking for a small speaker for a small space without losing quality or build. James Ellerbeck