Oh come, all ye faithful — today is Day 5 in Pogue’s 12 Days of Gadgets! One gift idea every day that you probably weren’t thinking about — and nothing over $100.
Usually.
Today, it’s the PowerTrip charger. It’s $109 (sue me).
Everyone in your gift-receiving circle probably knows the heartbreak of Dead Battery Syndrome. It’s barely dinnertime, and your iPhone, Android phone or tablet is giving you the “10 percent remaining” sign.
This white plastic brick, about the size of a deck of cards, nips that problem in the bud. There are plenty of backup battery gizmos available, of course, but this one is interesting because you can charge it from three different sources: a wall outlet, a computer’s USB jack or — get this — the sun. Yes, there’s a solar panel on the back for topping off the charge.
It’s got a huge backup battery: 6,000 milliamps, enough to recharge an iPad once or a smartphone four times. In other words, you probably don’t have to charge it up more than once a week, especially if it’s sometimes exposed to sunlight. A handy “gas gauge” on the side shows you how much charge remains in the PowerTrip.
So it’s a single replacement charger for multiple gadgets and it’s a backup battery. But it’s also a flash drive, with four, eight or 16 gigabytes of storage for use with your laptop or whatever.
You can charge any device that would normally plug into a computer’s USB jack, because the PowerTrip has a USB jack. Just use whatever charging cord came with your gadget. (The brick also comes with three cords of its own — the traditional Apple 30-pin iPod/iPad/Touch connector, mini-USB and micro-USB — to save you the trouble of bringing your own cable.)
In short, the gadgethound you give a PowerTrip to will owe you one. And you’ll be able to enjoy a power trip of your own.