Put the sun to work for you.

You can have power in your pocket if your travel with the Scosche SolBAT II battery/solar charger. It has a full sized USB port so you can charge most small electronics on the run, on the plane, in the woods. It comes with removable suction cups that let you recharge it in the car as you travel. Inside this device is a 1500mAh capacity battery. The USB output is the typical 5-volts. Now there is a downside to this device being so small. It’s small, which makes the solar panel smaller. That means, according to the user manual, it’ll take up to 4-5 days to fully charge the internal battery using the solar panel. (I guess a day or two in the desert.) Reading some other reviews of this unit, it seems that the 4-5 thing is the absolutely worst case scenario. Our friends at Laptop Magazine placed a solBAT II outside for 3.5 hours on a mostly sunny day and it gathered enough power to charge an iPhone 3G to 75% before giving out. That’s seems really good to me! The kit includes a USB cable so you can charge your device with your computer. Or you can do what I did, hooked the charging cable to one of those AC plug/USB adapters and charged it with AC. Computer or AC charging will bring the battery up to full power in about four to five hours. But if you’re out in the sun use the included belt clip or suction cups to keep this device in the sun to the charge up. At the CEA Line Show in June, a spokesperson at the Scosche booth said that fully charged the SolBat II would charge most cell phones twice before the unit needed to be recharged. I also noticed in the instruction they call it the SunVolt. Seems like a better name than the SolBat II to me. It’s under $30, but on Amazon I saw this gizmo for under $20!

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