TechRadar: All Mobile phone cables cradles chargers & mains adapters Feeds

Power Traveller Powergorilla

Graham Barlow — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 11:49:00 +0000

Much has been made of the MacBook Air's completely sealed case, meaning you can't simply pop in a new battery when you're out of juice and on the road.

The Powergorilla offers a solution – it's a tough and portable laptop battery charger.

Once you've charged it up you can get pretty much a full charge on your MacBook Air out of it. There's also a USB port that enables you to charge your iPod and iPhone (we tested it with a variety of iPods, and they all charged happily).

Adapter woes

Annoyingly, while it comes with all sorts of leads in the box, for every type of PC laptop and mobile phone under the sun, it doesn't come with Apple's MagSafe adaptor.

To get it to work with your MacBook Air you need to buy Apple's MagSafe Airline Adapter (£29), and plug that into the car charger adaptor that comes in the box. It's a convoluted process, but it does work.

The Powergorilla also charges the MacBook Pro, but you'd be better off buying a second battery for £99 from Apple.

Juicebar Emergency Charger

James Ellerbeck — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:51:00 +0000

Ah yes, just when you thought the world was waking up to pollution issues, another disposable, one-charge battery plonks on your desk.

Juicebars are emergency mobile phone chargers that work by giving you a one-off charge. You cannot recharge a Juicebar.

Like one of those fruit juice sachets, the batteries are flat-packed and in the place of a straw is a charged coupling. There isn't a Juicebar for iPhones yet, but Nokia, Samsung and Sony are covered – a list is on the website.

Charge it, bin it

Our Samsung model of Juicebar worked fine. It did the job, charging the phone from dead to full in around the time our socket plug takes to do the same job. You feel like a Luddite dumping the spent sachet into a bin, though.

Our Samsung phone has a standby time that lasts nearly a week, and for a long journey we either pack a charger or a spare battery. Unless it's a real emergency, we wouldn't use it.

Just Mobile Xtand

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:44:00 +0000

The Xtand is an iPhone stand. It offers a precise fit for a first-generation iPhone (we didn't test it with a new 3G model), and comes with rubber-coated arms that tenderly grip the phone.

The iPhone slots in with the gentlest of pushes, but is then held in place firmly, requiring one hand to be placed on the stand base to help slide it back out again.

We admire the precision. No marks are left on the iPhone, and there's plenty of space for an earphone jack and the Universal Dock cable. The angle of the tilt can be adjusted in a very narrow range, and the gripping arms do rotate 360 degrees.

View your iPhone more easily

The value of the product is the convenience it brings by tilting the iPhone towards your head, rather than lying flat on your desk.

At £30 it's a lazy convenience, but yes, this might suit you better than the iPhone lying flat. It is stable for watching films, but can wobble when you are sliding buttons around.

We guess that the main purpose of the stand is for watching films on your iPhone. The obvious problem here, though, is that if you intend to watch a film on your desktop, why not watch it on your Mac or TV?

While travelling on a train, for example, you might enlist the help of a jumper or book to prop up the iPhone. You may even own an iPhone case that has a foldout arm to help, though we have yet to see these elegantly executed. As part of our test, we took the Xtand on the train with us.

Inconvenient device

Once set up, the Xtand is much better than the aforementioned jumper/book combo.

The problem, though, is that the stand cannot fold away into a discreet pocket. It's a static, clunky, oddly-shaped brute to cart about, and is not really portable in any sense of the word.

To recap, the stand works well for watching movies, and less well for sliding buttons about, but our main problem is that we don't really have a need for it at home.

Outside the home, it's inconvenient to travel with. So, aside from just buying the Xtand to have a plinth-like frame for admiring the iPhone, we have trouble seeing when we would use it.

Well-crafted

We take our hat off to the maker for the precise engineering. Everything seems to be good quality, and we particularly like the iMac-like design.

If this is exactly the thing you have been looking for, you'll find it a well-crafted iPhone accessory.

However, it doesn't fit into our lives particularly well.

Visparts Backup Battery

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 10:40:15 +0000

Your iPhone battery life can drain away alarmingly quickly, especially if you use your iPhone for watching video.

The Visparts Backup Battery for iPhone plugs into the dock connector to recharge your battery for when you're almost out of juice. It's styled just like the iPhone on the front, complete with glass panel, metallic edge and black plastic on the rear.

Not very secure

You need to charge the Backup Battery for one hour using the standard iPhone docking cable, then, with the Backup Battery attached to your iPhone, you can start making calls almost immediately, so you don't have to wait for the charging process to finish.

We found that it charged an empty iPhone battery to about half.

But there's one fundamental flaw: you'd expect the Backup Battery to feel secure once attached to your iPhone, but it wobbled alarmingly when connected and, because of this, we didn't feel confident handling our iPhone with the Backup Battery attached.

OptiUPS Solar Charger

tech.co.uk staff — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 00:00:00 +0000

What with the fact that every member of British society and their pet gerbil has an MP3 player, we're seeing more and more of these fancy battery backup devices whizzing around.

This is perhaps the neatest, and most environmentally friendly of the lot, packing a rechargeable battery and a pair of solar panels in one slimline device.

The backup battery can be charged either via standard DC-in, car cigarette lighter or by exposing the panels to either ambient or direct sunlight. So, even on those long weekends out in the sticks, you'll never be without enough juice to make an emergency phone call or top up your MP3 player.

The Opti-UPS charger has a standard selection of power adaptors, including female USB and male mini USB. While it's unlikely to completely recharge your mobile, the solar option makes this an extremely impressive bit of kit.

Powertraveller Power Monkey

tech.co.uk staff — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

If you've ever been out and about and the battery on your mobile phone, PDA or MP3 player has died, you'll know how frustrating it can be.

The Power Monkey is an emergency charger small enough to carry around with you and act as a quick top-up. You'll need to charge it before you set off, but it comes with a variety of adapters so you can use it in 150 countries around the world.

It also comes with a host of different device connectors, ranging from the Sony PSP, Apple iPod and BlackBerry, through to most standard phones. You can even charge most mini-USB based devices, including Bluetooth headsets.

It's a great tool that really works and, while you have to ask yourself why you remembered to charge the monkey and not your phone, it'll help prolong your mobile device's battery life on even the longest of journeys.