Have you ever needed to give your cell phone a little bit of juice to get through a call? Were you near a socket when you needed to do it? If not, then you might wish that you had carried the USB AAA Battery Charger with Torch from USB Fever with you. It’s now become something I never leave home without.
The charger holds 4 AAA NiMH batteries and is very compact. It will fit in your khaki pocket, purse or gear bag very easily.
The charger comes with a cable that has 2 USB A connectors on each end; just connect the cable to the charger and the other end of the cable into a powered USB Port. Charge time from the USB port is around 2 and half hours. That seems like a long time, but isn’t bad. But if time is of the essence, then you might want to get a quick charger to keep at home for faster charging. This charger can power 2 or 4 batteries so if you just want to use it just to charge batteries, then that’s possible.
If that’s all it would do, then it would still be handy. You can flip the switch from Charge to Use and plug in any device that will charge off of a USB port. Devices I have charged have been my LG enV, a Nintendo DS Lite, a iPod Nano, a Insignia Pilot and my Insignia Bluetooth Headphones. The USB AAA Charger will charge anything that can charge from a USB port. I was able to fully charge my iPod and still have plenty of battery left to charge other things or to use the next feature.
If all it did was charge batteries and then use the batteries to charge many different devices, how much would you pay? How much would you pay if it was also a LED flashlight? The torch in the name is a LED flashlight. The LED is on the opposite side of the USB port and is very bright. It’s nice to have a small flashlight in your bag, you never know when you’ll need one!
The USB AAA Battery Charger with Torch is such a versatile device that it has earned a permanent spot in my gear bag.
It is available from USB Fever.
MSRP: $14.99. Mobile phone or game connector tips are $3.00 each and retractable iPod cables and other USB cables that work with the charger are $4.00.
What I like: It is very portable and takes almost no space up in the gear bag.
What needs improvement: I dislike all of the little bits. It would be nice to have a small case come with it to hold the different adapters and cables. For now, I store it in a Ziploc bag.
I own three of these, and I never leave home without one. The best thing about taking one of these on travels is that if you need more power than a unit can provide, you can just swap in new AAAs and keep charging or using your mobile device without having to recharge your backup power unit (as you would if you were using one a comparable closed-cell unit).
However, I got my units at a fraction of the price you bought yours for. USB Fever charges about $15 for each unit, plus postage. DealExtreme has these for $9.12 with free shipping worldwide: http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.3205
My only gripe with these units having owned three for several months is that the printed text on the case wears off quite quickly. Not such a big problem for the brand name printed on the case, but the three little switch labels (“Charge” “Use and “Off”) are really important – if you try to charge the unit while it’s switched to “Use”, you WILL kill your unit… and once the labels have rubbed off, I’ve had to think hard a couple of times to remember how to switch the unit.
Buy three like me – you won’t regret it. 🙂