chargers - page 5

Believe it or not, Black Friday has already come and gone. Pretty soon the Christmas season will begin, and we’ll mark this midwinter festival by getting together with friends and family and continuing to drink and eat far too much.
Meanwhile, we also buy gifts for those same friends and family members, whether they want them or not. Luckily, we’re here to help, and if you follow our festive advice, your gifts just might make it into the “wanted” category.
From now until Christmas, Cult of Mac will be putting together holiday gift guys full of ideas for the special ones in your life, no matter what their interests or your budget. Today, we’re looking at gifts for the lovely laydee in your life.

After months of silence, big accessory makers are finally starting to rollout products for Apple’s Lightning dock connector just in time for the holidays. One such example is Griffin’s new PowerJolt SE car charger. The cord plugs into your car’s 12 volt power outlet and channels 10 watts of juice to your Lightning-equipped iOS device.

My iPhone would die if I couldn’t charge it in the car. I’ve been using a 30-pin Belkin charger with Apple’s Lightning adapter since I got my iPhone 5, but Griffin sent me the new PowerJolt SE last week.

Lightning might be the connector of the future, and quite frankly it already seems absurd to me that I have to plug Apple’s huge old 30-pin dock connector into my little last-gen Nano just to charge it, but the oversized, hard-to-insert adapter will be hanging around for as long as people still have their perfectly good last-gen iDevices.

And Tylt’s Band Wall Charger looks to be a rather excellent charger for you luddites out there.

Prediction: A lot of East-Coasters are going to be getting solar panels and hand-cranked battery chargers this Christmas – what better stable-door/bolted-horse gift could there be?

So, if you are somehow optimistic enough to think that the sun will shine in New York in the winter, and pessimistic enough to think that global warming will send yet another squall of squirrelly weather this year, then the Switch 8 is for you.

Lightning chargers! Get your Lightning chargers here! Scosche has finally announced a set of basic home and car chargers for the current crop of iDevices, and you can actually buy the things.

It used to be so simple: you grabbed your gadget, and you plugged it into the nearest available USB hole. Then, a few minutes or hours later, your device was fully charged.

Now we have retina iPads with laptop-sized batteries, 5W, 10W and 12W chargers, and even differently-rated USB ports in our Macs. It’s so confusing.

Let’s make this problem disappear by throwing some money at it. $49 worth of cash-money, to be precise. And that $49 will get you the… DoubleUp!

I have no illusions about this retractable Lightning cable for charging your current-gen iOS devices – it looks so much like the crappy USB and 30-pin dock connector cables that come in those vending machine accessory kits that I wouldn’t be surprised if you could break the thing inside a few weeks, just by using it as it is meant to be used.

But it is just $10, and it is actually available to buy, which are two major points in its favor.

Just when you thought an iPhone or iPad dock had been built into every possible household object, here comes the iRocking Chair. In looks, it's a pretty traditional rocker, but it has some surprises built in. Not least is the fact that it can charge an iPad 3.

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.

Complaining about Apple gypping you by changing its terrible, bulky, hard-to-use 30-pin dock connector for the sleek, double-sided Lightning connector? Then take a look at the alternative from Samsung. One of the few things it didn't copy from Apple was the giant connector, but that's not to say it got anything right.

$9. Nine lousy dollars. With nine bucks, there’s no way you could make an iPhone stand this good, even buying parts from the cheapest of hardware stores. Hell, the only way to make a functional iPhone holder with $9 is to head to the bank, buy a roll of quarters and sit the iPhone up on top.

Which is hardly as elegant as this very practical-looking Pi Mount.

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.

11,666mAh. That’s the nightmare figure that faces you every time you plug the newest iPad in to charge. You really need to charge the thing overnight, otherwise you’ll be sitting there for hours and hours waiting for the battery meter to tick over to 100%.

And the myCharge Peak 6000 – like most external battery packs – will only make a small contribution to that yawning, ravenous battery. It will toss 6,000 mAh into the void before excusing itself for its own refill, but if you use it with, say, an iPhone you will be able to charge the thing several times over.

The Peak 6000 wins on design, too. The wall prongs are built in for fast hookup, as are a 30-pin dock connector and a microUSB plug. You won’t be losing any parts of this charger. It even has a pop-out USB input for charging from a computer, should there only be one wall-wart available.

The price for this well-designed back up? $99. Buy two and you’d have enough to fully charge the greedy, bloated iPad 3.

Source: myCharge

You lucky thing. The summer’s over, or nearly over, and you’re already planning on heading back to school. Just like last year, you will begin this year fresh and full of energy and enthusiasm, only to be ground down by the man. Luckily, we’re here to help with advice on the best apps and gear to get you through the year and into next year’s summer vacation with the least effort possible.

So sit back, relax and take a look at the Cult of Mac back to school/college superguide.

Aviiq’s new “Quick Charge Universal Dock Adapter” is a handy three-in-one charger cable featuring miniUSB, microUSB and a 30-pin dock connector, all connected permanently to a regular-sized USB plug on the other end. Yes, it’ll cost you $30, but then again, you’ll never, ever leave an essential cable at home again.

It’s August, which means two things. One, there’s no news to report on, which means that most of a gadget blogger’s workday is taken up with siestas and refreshing beverages. And two, it’s vacation time! That’s right: The whole northern hemisphere likes to take a break at exactly the same time, all the better to enjoy congested roads, overpriced plane tickets and overcrowded hotels.

To ease your pain, we’ve put together a list of the best travel gadgets. You may not enjoy spending a hot and stuffy month with your in-laws, but at least your tech won’t let you down.

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.

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.

You know those awful bendable lamps that coil from your computer’s long-suffering USB port and let you point the cold, bluish-green LED light in any direction except the one you want? Well, somebody took one of these silvery snakes, improved it, turned it into an iPhone charger and gave it a ridiculous name: The Une Bobine. It’s probably French or something.

Take a look at your desk. Now, find a cable. Chances are that it is tangled up with another cable, and even if it isn’t, then it is probably tied to itself in knots. What if you had a set of commonly used cables that were impossible to tangle? Aviiq’s Ready Clips will provide you with this courtesy, and they throw in pen-like clips to sweeten the deal.

[This post has been updated to reflect the fact that Scosche’s reVOLT charger only comes with two ports]

There seems to be some discrepancy in talent between the naming and the product departments at Scosche: the former can come up with a product name like “reVOLT pro h2,” and the latter with a product like, well, the product inside the package with “reVOLT pro h4” written on the outside. Revolting nomenclature aside, the pro h2 is a charger which can juice up to two iPads at the same time, via its duo of 10W (2.1A) USB ports.

Take a look under your desk at that power-strip. My guess is that, even though it is probably overloaded with another power-strip plugged into it, there are at least a couple of spare sockets. It’s not that you don’t need them — it’s that you can use them thanks to all the awkward-shaped adapters jammed into it. If only you could bend and twist your power-strip to get better access to its hard-to-reach holes…

Going camping this spring? And by “camping” I mean hiking or biking with your home on your back, and heading out into the wilderness. I don’t mean loading up your SUV and dragging a grill, a tent the size of a European house and enough ball games to keep an entire schools-worth of kids occupied for a month.

So, if you’re heading out under your own power, how about taking a stove that a) requires no liquid fuel, b) burns fast and hot and c) charges your iPhone? What’s not to like?

I have had to replace more than one frazzled MagSafe charger thanks to an uncharacteristically bad piece of design by Apple. Sure, the magnetic connection breaks away to save the connected Mac from a fall, and it’s great that the latest MagSafe adapters have newly-designed, tougher aluminum tips, but the junction between the cord and the chager itself is still pathetically weak. So weak it makes a sick kitten look like Chuck Norris.

Thinklabs’ Wrap Up is an effective solution to this.

Do you have an old film SLR lying around that you promise yourself you will one day load up with film and take out shooting? Well, forget about that — it’s just taking up space and picking up dust. You should instead do what Etsy-er Roberto Altieri does, and turn it into a dock for the camera you actually use every day: Your iPhone.