Amen! A charging case designed for the iPhone 5. Mophie’s new Juice Pack Helium ($79) is one of the first of its kind that work with longer iDevice, so if you find your i5’s often running in the red battery zone by noon each day, read on for the full review. This sleek and slim charging case might just be exactly what you need.
This is the Unu Enerpak Vault. It’s an excellent spare battery pack for any of your portable devices, and it is even powerful enough to almost (almost) charge the thirsty, thirsty Retina iPad.
But what it does the most (apart from get you out of pretty much any charging emergency) is show the amazing difference between the batteries inside out iDevices.
Even if the only traveling you do is from your home to your office, and even if that “office” is actually just your bedroom, then you will probably find the PlugBug wicked useful. But if you ever leave your home country’s own shores, then you might consider the PlugBug World, a globally-aware charger for your MacBook and iDevices.
We showed you a handful of fantastic, instant keyboard shortcuts to shut down, reboot, or sleep your Mac, but an even safer way is to bring up the Power button dialog box that happens when you hit the, well, Power button on your Mac. That’s the one in the upper right corner of the keyboard on most modern Macs, while some older Macs have it as a separate button integrated into the body of the Mac itself.
Either way, hit that Power button and then you can use the following keyboard shortcuts to activate the different options in the dialog.
You probably don’t give much thought to your chargers – after all, they come bundled with your devices, and Apple’s especially are mostly well-designed (MagSafe 2). But Kanex’s DoubleUp – which I took with me on a recent whistle-stop tour of Las Vegas and San Francisco – is worth a look if you travel a lot, or even if you just want something a little better, and a little more convenient, than Apple’s free option.
The one big advantage of traveling in the U.S is that I get to use your crappy, cheap-ass two-pin power plugs. I love that these small pieces of junk can fold up even smaller. Compare this to taking a vacation to the UK, where the adapters are the size of 1980s-era cellphones and young citizens have to be trained in the use of their safety features.
All of which is a roundabout (and culturally insulting) way to say I love Quirky’s new Pivot Power Mini, a tiny lightbulb-sized adapter which converts a single socket into two USB ports and a pair of power-points.
As we all know, sometimes the simplest ideas are the best. You can usually tell when an idea is a winner because it seems so obvious that somebody should have made it already. And the Tethercell is one of these ideas: it’s a remote control battery that will let you switch any AA-powered device on and off from your iPhone.
Do you know your 7,200-times-table by heart? Good, because if you buy the JuiceCane, you’re going to need it.
Why? Because the JuiceCane is a stackable, extendable spare battery which packs 7,200 mAh of power, and can be joined to other JuiceCanes to increase that capacity.
The MagSafe 2 power plug is so intent on escaping from its socket that it doesn’t seem a great idea to hook it up to a portable battery, but if you need the extra power, you need the extra power. And right now pretty much the only way to get it is to grab one of QuickerTek’s MacBook Air batteries.
You gotta love Apple (no, seriously, you gotta love Apple to get a job here at Cult of Mac – Leander tests our faith every day during Morning iService) – it might keep quiet and take its time to fix things, but fix them it does. Well, for high-profile problems at least.
Today’s fix is a new iPad charger, a beefed up 12-watt model which should juice the iPads 3 and 4 faster than the old model.
There’s an important list every serious outdoor junkie has at least heard of — it’s called the Ten Essentials, and it lists gear no adventurer should journey into the wilds without. But it was codified long before the digital age arrived; now that power-hungry electronic gadgets are a part of adventuring, a relaible backup fuel tank is pretty important. It could even make the difference between life and death.
That’s where Mophie’s Juice Pack Powerstation Pro ($130) comes in. It’s a monstrous 6000 mAh chunk of a battery guarded by a ruggedized, military-spec housing — and it’ll charge practically anything short of a laptop.
It used to be that we carried spare batteries for our devices. Then Apple sealed its products’ cases shut and some of us complained. Loudly. Then we realized that carrying an external battery pack meant we didn’t have to power-down to swap out batteries, and that we could now pick and choose the perfect third-party option, and we all shut the hell up.
Which is my long-winded way of introducing the new Zaggsparq packs, a range of three battery packs tailored perfectly to your iCharging needs. As long as you don’t own an iPad 3, that is.
Satechi’s USB Surge Protector might just be the cutest little surge protector ever seen, with its look of surprised dismay, and its colorful two-tone shell. It even hads a little LED which tells you that it’s still alive, and which will eventually fade to nothing when the unit finally dies. And die it will:
Wouldn’t it be cool if you could drop your iPhone or iPad on top of your speaker and have it charge as it pumps out the tunes? That’s the promise of TDK’s Wireless Charging Speaker, a product with a name about as self-evident as it gets.
IPad 3. Hired: Retina screen, speedy 4G internet, lots of lovely RAM. Fired: Weight. Heat. Girth. Retired: That damn battery.
Yes, if the iPad 3 were to be leaping over a fence to escape its doom, and Paris were to fire an arrow to stop it, the arrow would hit the iPad 3 in its battery charger, not its heel (sorry about the extended and twisted Greek adventure story there). Sure, the battery lasts long enough, but it takes forever to charge the thing.
Happily, Exogear’s stackable battery packs are here to help.
This handsome retro-styled accessory is the Textile iCable from Eastern Collective, a dock-connector with its wire wound in cotton to make it look like an old-timey kettle lead or even a bicycle pump adapter. And if I wasn’t banking on Apple switching over to a new dock connector for all future iDevices (and if I didn’t already have a drawer full of white cables), I’d probably already have ordered a few.
At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, the only thing I was hunting down more than free drinks and after-parties, was power outlets. Yes sir, I love my purdy white iPhone 4S, but on days of heavy use, I find I need to charge it two times or more before the day is through.
The Dual USB Power Bank from Verbatim (about $65), provides a a massive amount of portable power that should keep anyone from outlet-hunting in the inky-shadows of Vegas convention halls. But the question is, how does it perform while charging two connected devices or the power-hungry new iPad?
I spent most of last week riding my loaded-up bike through the north of Spain, and as any self-respecting geek would do, I was carrying gadgets, including a power-hungry iPad 3, and a Changers solar-powered charger. I’m planning a longer post on how this worked out, but right now I’m going to tell you about a new accessory for the Changers charger which should make it even more effective on road trips.
This is the uNu Ex-Era battery case for iPhone 4 and 4S. It offers a degree of flexibility you won’t find in most other battery cases, although that flexibility comes with a drawback – namely that the case doesn’t feel as robust as some of its less flexible rivals. But you can’t have everything, all the time.
This is the Sandberg Battery Case for iPhone 4. Designed in Italy, it’s a low-cost backup power supply and case with svelte good looks. It provides a good balance between size and power storage, but isn’t without some flaws. Overall, it’s a good deal but let down by what look like lapses in manufacturing quality control.
Why carry just a tiny iPad charging brick and a few miniature USB cables to juice all of your gadgets when you could instead schlep this huge "Portable Charging Station with Cable Rack" along with you instead? That’s what AViiQ hopes you’ll do, and it also wants you to pay $80-$100 for the privilege.
One of the biggest customer complaints about the iPhone 4S is battery life. The battery never manages to last even a whole day and sometimes not even a half of a day. Although the iPhone 4 has always managed to last nearly a whole day, it isn’t much better. Apple is working on an iOS 5 software fix that might eventually take care of the battery draining issues that face iPhone 4S customers. Their first attempt, the release of iOS 5.0.1, wasn’t much help for some users.
If you cannot wait any longer and you own either of these phones one solution could be the MiLi Power Pack 4 ($60) from xengadget.com. The 3000 mAh slider case will give your iPhone 4 or 4S the extra power boost it needs to last until bed time. I tested it on my iPhone 4S and I’d like to share my experience with you.
When I go on vacation and I want to take my notebook and iOS devices with me, I have to pack a bunch of white cables into my case — all of which seem to be tangled up with each other by the time I take them out again. However, Apple is developing a universal all-in-one data & power cable that will charge both your Mac and your iOS devices, and allow you to transfer data between them.
Rumor has it that Apple is already working on a new method of charging our iPhones for 2012, and many believe the company may introduce wireless magnetic charging using technology developed by WiTricity. But according to a report from DigiTimes, future iOS devices may absorb all the energy they need from the sun.
With an effete wave of his hand, Steve Jobs could have you and everyone you cared about bludgeoned to death in the night by turtleneck-wearing goons armed with iPhone-stuffed socks, but that’s not enough to make him crack the top ten in Forbes’ list of most powerful people on the planet.
Nonetheless, the strongly spoken Apple CEO has managed to go up quite a few notches on the list, buoyed by Apple’s successes in the mobile arena. He climbed from the 57th spot last year to number 17 this year.