What if your iPhone charging cable could charge your phone even when it wasn’t plugged into a charger? It’d be pretty neat, right? Well, that’s what Native Union’s Jump does, and it does it all while being the best-looking Lightning cable yet.
I’m a sucker for great charger designs, and Ventev’s Utilitycharger 2100 is clearly a smart design. So clever is it that I’m even willing to overlook my hatred of cards for a few minutes as I write this post.
Christmas is a filthy time of year. First, it’s in the middle of the winter, when coughs, sneezes and dirty old diseases are most common. And second, extra germs, bacteria and viruses hitch a ride on us meatbag humans as we jet around the globe to see our families, swirling the air into a slurry of septicity.
It’s no wonder Santa spends the rest of the year in bed.
What you need to counteract this insurgence of influenza is the PhoneSoap charger, a kind of Howard Hughes-style tissue box for your iPhone, only with a UV lamp inside.
It used to be OK to ask a stranger in a bar “do you have a Nokia charger?” and borrow said charger for a while to juice your phone. These days, though, you’ll mark yourself out as a Low-Charge Loser, the kind of person who goes to bed without plugging in his iPhone. Worse, you’re probably carrying more than just a phone. Are you really going to ask a stranger for adapters to charge your iPad and Kindle too?
You are not. What you need is a beefy backup battery. And at this time of year, it should be waterproof, too.
I haven’t spent time on a construction site for some time, so I don’t know if it’s still true that every builder has a transistor radio. I do know that we had our kitchen remodeled a few months back and the guy our landlord sent to do it had the same kind of plaster and dirt-caked mains-powered radio you have been able to see for decades the world over.
He also seemed to spend a lot of time texting instead of working, so maybe he could have done with one of these iPhone chargers that uses a DeWalt battery pack for power.
Ever find yourself stuck without a cable when you need to charge your iPhone? No, me either. I’m a nerd and a professional gadget tester, so at pretty much all times I have some kind of Lightning cable, dock or adapter either on my person or close to hand.
But if I got out more, and was more stylish in general, then I’d be sporting a Kyte & Key Cabelet, or cable bracelet.
I don’t know what it is with wireless chargers and the letters Q and I, but what I do know is that the iQi is the first one I have actually considered using. You see, instead of a fat case to hold the induction circuits, or the flux capacitor, or whatever it is that makes wireless charging possible, the iQi is a tiny slim sheet that slips inside your existing case.
The Satechi Smart Travel Router might just be the most useful travel adapter ever made. Not only can it plug into a wall socket pretty much anywhere in the world, it can also charge your iPhone and create a wireless network.
It’s not just you: iOS 7 has seemingly killed off support for some unlicensed, third-party Lightning cables.
If iPhone 5 chargers keep getting smaller at the same rate, soon the whole thing will fit inside the Lightning hole like some kind of USB-powered suppository. For now, though, you’ll have to settle for the still impressively small ChargeKey, a teeny tiny USB-to-Lightning adapter that – yes – hooks onto a keyring.
Goal Zero’s new Lighthouse 250 Lantern and USB Power Hub is a camper’s best friend. By day, it’s a USB charger with a backup battery, ready for juicing your waning iPhone. By night, it’s a lamp which will run for up to 48 hours.
Apple announced a new charge trade-in program earlier this month, which gives those with third-party iPhone, iPad, and iPod adapters the chance to take them in and swap them for official ones at a special price. At first, it seemed the program was only available to customers in the U.S. and China, but that’s not the case.
According to a new support document on Apple’s website, those in the U.K., Canada, Australia, Japan, and parts of Europe can also take advantage of the offer.
The FlameStower looks like a clever way to keep your iPhone charged while you’re camping in the wilderness. Just fill its reservoir with water, stick the other end into the flames of your campfire and plug your chosen gadget into the USB port. Relax with the charred meat and beverage of your choice, and—just three hours later—your iPhone will be fully charged.
We’ve all been there: out of juice on the road and with no charging cable on hand. You can, of course, carry around a 30-pin or Lightning charging cable with you, but that takes up space. There’s something to be said for a small footprint and peace-of-mind.
Enter the Kii by Bluelounge. It’s sync-and-charge piece of mind on a keychain, in a very convenient form factor.
Last month, security researchers figured out there was a Trojan horse built into an iOS device: the charger. If a hacker wanted to, they could use a modified charger (which costs less than $45) that would install malware onto any device running iOS.
True, the hack required physical proximity — not to mention specialized hardware — to work. But it was a universal hack that worked on any device, and it could make a victim out of anyone doing something as simple as asking to borrow someone’s iPhone charger at the local Starbucks.
A bad hack indeed. But Apple’s on the case.
Dumb phones had a few advantages over today’s smartphones. First, their batteries lasted for what seemed like weeks between charges. And second, if the battery did die, all you lost was the ability to call and SMS people. You didn’t lose your e-mail, your camera, your iPod, the book you’re reading or the movie you were planning to watch on the train home.
So you carry a spare battery. But what if you could eliminate the need for that spare, and also ditch that creepy wrist-strengthener you insist on pumping all the time like some hyperactive pervert?
Good news! With the Mipwr Dynamo Case, you can do both.
iPhone chargers are dropping bodies all over China this week. Following an incident earlier this week in which a Chinese woman was electrocuted using a third-party charger, a 30-year old Chinese man has been put into a coma for ten days after plugging in his iPhone.
The modern digital camera is a miracle. It can take photos in light so low that you can’t even focus the lens manually. It can record thousands of images onto a single SD card, or it can shoot RAW and let you make incredible adjustments back in the comfort of your own home.
But one thing that has driven me crazy with pretty much every digital camera I have ever owned is its charger. They’re almost universally terrible. Which is why I bought this Digipower alternative. But is it actually any better?
One of the unsung advantages of the iPhone’s crazy popularity is that you can almost always find a charger for it, whether from the lost property box at a hotel or from the guy at the next desk in your office.
But now that Lightning exists, things are more complicated, and a lot of the old 30-pin cables people were willing to lend out are now useless. So how about carrying your own? That’s the idea behind the Nomad cable, a three-inch stub which attaches to your keychain.
Bluelounge’s new MiniDock really is mini. It’s a tiny little dock which perfectly matches the cuboid charger that came with your iPhone or iPad mini, and turns it into a wall-mounted dock. The device is as portable and effective as it is handy, especially if you never use a case. I have one here in Cult of Mac’s Spanish HQ, and I have been putting it through its paces in our Extreme Test Lab.
This is the Bracketron, a robot which will help you fill out your NCAA tournament charts. Not really. The Bracketron is in fact a robot which will help you put up shelves that won’t fall down as soon as you place something breakable up there.
NOT REALLY AGAIN. The Bracketron is a USB charger which leeches its power from an outlet that is already in use. Which actually makes it better than my first two lies… Except for the robot part.
Sick of tangled cords when traveling? Want to look more like a cool-headed doctor than a disorganized teenager when you tend to the charging of your various iGadgets? Then the Cordito Wrap is for you: It’s a super-stylish (and super-simple) leather sheet for organizing cables and chargers.
My camera eats batteries. I’m not sure exactly why — maybe it’s because the NP-95 battery it uses is tiny; maybe it’s that its hybrid viewfinder is particularly power hungry; or perhaps it’s just that I refuse to engage any of the performance-slowing power-save modes — but my X100s is thirsty.
I get around this by carry a pocketful of those tiny batteries, but taking the giant Fujifilm charger on vacation is a pain. So I set out to find a USB charger that would do the job without frying the batteries.
Then I realized I was doing it wrong. Instead of a USB-powered battery charger, what I needed was a proper camera battery charger which had a USB port in the side. Thus I could charge everything from one wall socket, in one compact unit.
The device is the Digipower TC–55.
As travel chargers go, The Goal Zero Switch 8 kit is about as convenient as it gets. The two panels fold into one easy-to-carry pack, and on the back is a zippered mesh bag in which the battery pack and USB converter sit. There’s space in that bag for a phone or other small device, and there are enough paracord loops around the edges to secure the pack, open or closed, to just about anything.
So how does it perform?
Eton’s new BoostSolar a) is here just in time for sunny summer and b) solves many of the problems usually present in solar chargers. It also looks pretty cool, and less like the utili-hippy designs beloved of rivals.