When I travel, I always make sure to bring along all my cameras, phone, laptop, chargers, etc. It’s a lot to carry around, but I’d rather lug it all around with me than forget something and find myself disconnected from my technology. Still, there have been times where I’ve been stuck in an airport with no laptop or no way to charge my phone. The future looks slightly less bleak with something I noticed at the Dallas Fort Worth airport on my way home last night.
It’s called PowerPort and it handles all your charging problems in one spot, prints, gets you online, and offers up laptops to rent.
Charge anything
OK… Probably not anything, but they claim it can charge up to 1,200 makes and models of devices, which pretty much means that they’re including the 7 or 8 most popular connectors. If your device has some crazy proprietary connector and isn’t an iPod, you may be out of luck. Even so, In Philadelphia, I charged my iPhone in a laptop workstation area at the terminal and kept looking up from my more comfortable seat 10 feet away to make sure someone didn’t walk off with it. $4.50 might just be worth it to not have to worry about that if you have an expensive device in need of charging. Ultimately, I’d suggest having something like the Mophie Juice Pack or the Ecosol Powerstick with you, but in a pinch, $4.50 is an OK rescue price for a dead battery.
Rent a laptop
If I didn’t feel compelled to take my laptop everywhere, I would be all over this, and that may be its only flaw. I think people who really need to be online that much will generally have a laptop next to them at the terminal already. That’s not to say it’s a bad idea. When I saw it, I thought it was a great idea and a great price. For $6.95 an hour, you can have an internet-connected laptop to use while you wait for your flight. I see some possible problem areas. First, it’s an unmanned kiosk, so there’s nobody to check the laptops when they are returned after rental. The reason this gives me concern is that it’s like lending your laptop to someone right before and right after you use it. How can you be assured that your data is secure and that the laptop will be free of viruses or even be functioning properly when you get it? I’m sure that 99.5% of the time a laptop rental will go flawlessly, but it’s the last .5% I’m worried about.
Print documents
There’s not much to say about this except that you can print documents with the laptop rental at no additional fee. Of course, it’s a shared printer out in the open, so if it’s confidential, you should go grab it right away.
Surf the web
We’ve seen this in airports and hotels for a while. I’ve never been a big fan of using a public computer that is easily viewable by anyone to get online. If I’m looking up directions on Google Maps or just checking some sports scores, that’s fine, but if I’m logging into something, checking email, etc., I want a little more privacy.
Additional thoughts
This isn’t a paid post, nor did I actually try any of the services offered and the website seems to be lacking in detailed specifics, so if you want more information, go to powerports.com and poke around or contact the company directly with questions. I wanted to write about it because, as a tech consumer, I was excited about the concept and would have forked over a few bucks to use it if I didn’t already have everything I needed with me. If you’ve used it, I’d love to hear your opinions and experiences.
Last week, I wrote about live streaming video from your car and in doing so, I mentioned something that helped my iPhone 3G keep powered up for the ride. That device is the Mophie Juice Pack for iPhone 3G from a company called mStation.
No, you can’t drink it
The Juice Pack for iPhone 3G is a device, not an actual juice pack that you can drink. A few people had to ask when I said things like “One second, I need to grab my Juice Pack”. The Juice Pack is actually a pretty sleek device and I had heard of it before, but hadn’t thought much about the need for it. When I got it, I also noticed that it looked like it could be a bit bulky. Basically, it’s a battery that your iPhone 3G slides into and it more than double’s the battery life of your phone.
The Juice Pack is very elegant in its design. If I had a decent budget to design a wrap-around style battery, this is pretty much the ideal. The added height is minimal, as is the thickness (for the capacity). It’s not very heavy, but the thickness is definitely noticeable. If keeping your pocket weight down to a minimum is a high priority, you might have to just talk and play less on your iPhone. It’s black on the outside, which matched my phone, but won’t match all phones. The color inside (which is hidden while in use) is a bright green, which just screams “energy” to me. The bottom contains the pass-through USB connection to charge and sync and on the back is a power indicator with four LEDs. When you press the button on the back, anywhere from one to four LEDs will light up depending on how much juice is left in your pack. If the aesthetics are important to you, I’m not sure you’ll find a better-looking battery supplement. I should add that they make Juice Packs for both generations of the iPhone as well as the iPod Touch and have a $79 Juice Pack Air coming soon.
How well does it work?
In my test, I didn’t notice it. That is to say that I mostly forgot it was wrapped around my iPhone, feeding it power. One of the things that I’ve noticed draining my battery quickly is prolonged video recording and playing or anything that constantly updates the screen like video. This is why the streaming video experiment was a good test. When I started out from my house, the iPhone battery and the Juice Pack were both about 100% charged up. I recorded (and streamed via 3G) audio and video of my drive to work which took about 20 minutes. When I had arrived at my office, I removed the Juice Pack and checked both it and the iPhone. My iPhone was at 100% still because, as I used it, the Juice Pack was constantly recharging it. The Juice Pack was about half full. At this rate, I could probably stream video for an hour with a fully charged iPhone and Juice Pack.
Conclusion
With a price tag of $99, you’re not going to get away with one of these cheap, but if you’re like me and you’re on your iPhone every ten minutes checking email, playing games, updating Twitter, etc., it is a very attractive option to keep you running while on the go. Compared to other devices that don’t integrate anywhere near as smoothly as the Juice Pack and that cost about $50-$80 for similar battery life, this is a nice upgrade for a little more money.
On a side note, if you buy from the Mophie web site, you might be able to tack on a good deal on another accessory. At the time of this writing, I noticed a clearance section of the site with a bunch of stuff for $0.99.
There’s a couple different ways that portable devices are powered these days, standard batteries, or proprietary. I love the ability to just purchase relatively cheap AA batteries to re-fuel a device when it goes dark, but being able to just recharge a device has it’s own advantages. One disadvantage is that I often need to be near a power source and I have to wait for my device to recharge or at best, I have to stay plugged in to keep using the device. An alternative is to fork over the cash for a second battery and this was often the first thing I did when I bought a new cell phone. My iPhone, on the other hand, requires a different approach, a solution found, perhaps, in EcoSol’s Powerstick.
What is it?
Just as the name implies, it’s a stick with power. More specifically, it’s a rechargeable battery that has a USB connector on one end to charge it up with power and a female jack on the other, where you attach a device using one of the nine included connection cables. The device can be powered up by the Powerstick to make it last beyond the normal lifetime of its internal power supply. Of course, this only works with devices that can accept external power to run or charge, but those that don’t almost always run off regular AA or similar batteries, anyway.
Real world testing
Out of the box, the Powerstick had about a 50% charge, so I packed it in my laptop bag for my vacation to Detroit. At the airport, I charged it up on my laptop’s USB port while I worked on my Peek review.
It didn’t take long at all to finish charging up, but it was a little distracting because I kept excitedly watching the little bars load up, waiting for it to show all eight. Although it can be distracting, it’s useful to be able to have an idea of how far along it is charging before it has finished. When it was done charging up, I unplugged it and threw it in my pocket.
I also spent a lot of time on my phone checking and replying to email, so it wasn’t long before I had my phone looking like it could use some charging, so I pulled the Powerstick back out, found the iPhone connector in the ZipLoc bag I keep them in, and plugged it all in. It started charging right away and when I looked back just a minute or two later, I could see that my phone was just a little more charged. By time I had to pack up to board the plane, my iPhone was all charged up again and ready to go.
Conclusions
This review was unique in that I went out and bought this device. One was going to be sent out, but there wasn’t a lot of time between when I had gotten in touch with the PR company and when I was going on vacation and I wanted to really test it out on vacation. That said, the question isn’t about whether I would buy one or not at around $60. What I really needed to decide was if I would keep it or try to recover the money spent on it via ebay or other means. To be honest, the price did make it a little difficult. If it were a little cheaper, I would say no contest and it really boils down to how much use you’ll get out of it. With the variety of connectors, the usability increases greatly as long as you have the gadgets. I have the gadgets and will probably get enough use from the Powerstick, so I decided to keep it. If you find yourself running out of power for your devices a lot, grab one. Just remember to keep it with you when you do.
