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. 🙂
Gah. Again Amazon Japan doesn’t sell this thing! Useless web shops!
Don’t know where i read it, but there seems to be a new advanced type of battery, often referred to as eneloop, from the name under which Sanyo sells them. They allegedly have high power (unusual for rechargeable batteries) and don’t lose their power over time.
Maybe this device of yours uses similar technology.
This new technology may as well be the reason why there suddenly appears notebooks on the market with extremely long battery time (DELL : 18h, Macbook Pro : 8h)
Anyway, have fun.
I will pick one of these up for myself. I like the idea of bring able to recharge on-the-go, instead of being stuck somewhere waiting for charge completion.
Hi Keith
Thanks for reviewing the FastMac iV. Pro tip for you on how to maximize battery life w/ the iV, especially on your trip to Japan: only charge in 30m increments. The iV has a rapid charge mode so it can take an iPhone from the 10 or 20% warning msg to ~ 75% charged in ~ 30m. It then takes another 90m to go from 75% to full. So instead of wasting that energy, just turn it off or pull out of the iV and save that power for another (literally) day!
Hope it serves you well & thanks again for purchasing and reviewing 🙂
– Abbi
I do have 1 complaint though: pretty disappointed you didn’t talk more about the flash feature- aren’t you supposed to be an expert or something 😛
@Willem
This may not impress KP as this type of battery has been out in Japan for years. When I was over there before the start of this decade, I purchased a cassette (yes, you heard me right) player. It’s battery would last 40 hours and only need 2 hours to recharge fully again. Why it’s taken this technology so long to reach other countries is beyond me.
In other news, a company I have a passive interest in has been providing cell phone chargers like this for a while. Due to their distribution channels (Skymall and QVC), many of us might not take the technology as seriously as we might if we’d seen it on a tech blog, but here’s the info nonetheless.
http://www.integratir.com/newsrelease.asp?news=2131022069&ticker=PWAC&lang=EN