High energy

Arts/Life

Posted By STEVE TILLEY

Posted 1 month ago

With great power comes great responsibility, as Spider-Man's uncle famously said. Yet we all crave power. We need it. And when we don't have it, we tend to freak out.

Especially when said power is juicing our mobile phones, music players and portable game machines. If you've ever had a phone die right before you needed to call a tow truck (or, worse yet, your PlayStation Portable shut down just as you were about to beat the final enemy), you know the sting of the empty battery icon. But it doesn't have to be so.

I've looked at a number of different portable power devices, but the Powermonkey eXplorer is the most comprehensive one yet. Essentially a small but powerful rechargeable battery, the eXplorer can be used to recharge a wide variety of mobile devices, including most types of cell-phones, digital music players, portable gaming machines and anything that can be charged via those trapezoid-shaped mini-USB plugs. Which, these days, is a whole whack of gadgets.

The Powermonkey eXplorer can be charged up in one of three ways: By attaching it to a USB port on your computer, by plugging it into a wall outlet or -- and this is the dealmaker here -- by opening up its little solar panel and setting it in the sun. No outlets? No problem!

This versatility makes the Powermonkey eXplorer useful for a lot of different folks. Road warriors who regularly rock an iPhone, BlackBerry and various other gizmos will find it a compact source of backup power for all their devices and the tiny recharger holds enough juice to take most phones from dead to fully charged in a few hours.

Globetrotters will like it too, because it comes with adaptors for almost any power outlet in the world. If you've ever arrived in a foreign country and realized your iPod charger won't fit in the weird-shaped wall outlet, you'll appreciate this.

And the solar panel makes for a great beach backup. You don't even have to bring the recharger itself; the solar panel can be plugged directly into most small gadgets.

There are a couple of caveats. The Powermonkey eXplorer comes with a pile of different adaptors, both for gadgets themselves and for power outlets, which can be a pain to keep track of. Of course, you only need to carry the ones that work with your specific gadgets, so that's not a big deal.

And the fold-out solar panel, while very cool (and environmentally friendly), recharges devices very slowly. Even if the panel is in full sunlight, it can take a full day to recharge the eXplorer's battery, and it may not be able to keep the devices it's attached to fully juiced while they're running. But at the very least it will extend their battery charge, meaning you could keep your phone or iPod powered up though an entire day at the beach.

Other than the scads of tiny parts and the not-exactly-cheap price -- the Powermonkey eXplorer sells for anywhere from $100 to $140 online, although it's available directly from its U.K. manufacturer for $110 including shipping -- there are very few bad things to say about this electrifying little primate. With great power comes great, well, greatness.

Submit content