FastMac iPhone Charger
When I was at 360iDev, the guys from FastMac had a booth set up where they were showing off (and selling) these iPhone chargers. It looked pretty cool and they were offering them at a nice discount for the conference. So caught up in the warm and fuzzy iPhone atmosphere, I grabbed one. Basicallly, it’s a battery pack that you slide your iPhone / iPod Touch into and it powers and charges the device. Supposedly, when the charger itself is fully charged, it is capable of recharging your device 2-3 times.
It has a standard iPhone / iPod jack on it so you can use it like a dock (though it doesn’t stand up like in the photo, it will just lie flat). It also has USB out, and will actually supply USB power via that USB out to any other USB-powered device! Pretty neat. Oh, and it also has a super-bright LED light, which you can use as a flashlight or an iPhone camera light.
Anyway, I got one and plugged it in and charged it up and threw it in my laptop bag. In the normal course of a day, I’m generally not too far away from a computer or source of iPhone power for more than an hour or two. So this device has been sitting at the bottom of my laptop bag for the last 6-7 weeks, untouched. The other day, we were out and about, and my daughter, bored, asked if she could play some games on my iPod Touch. I don’t actually used my iPod that often, so when I took it out I saw the battery was just about dead. Maybe a couple of minutes play time on it. Then I recalled the charger. I plugged it in, she played away for a good while. When she was done, I took it back, and put the iPod, still in the charger, back in my bag. When I took it out later that day, I saw that the iPod was fully charged.
I have to say, I was VERY impressed. Again, this charger had been sitting untouched for a month and a half, and had enough juice to run and fully charge a device. And the indicator showed that it still had at least half power, so I might have even gotten another charge out of it. Anyway, I like to blog about products that I am impressed with. So there you go. Granted, it’s not cheap, and it’s not the kind of device that you are going to use every day, but it’s a pretty awesome emergency backup device. And I think it will be a life saver on my upcoming trip to Japan – door to door, with layover, we’ll all be travelling for something like 20 hours. 🙂