Proporta Universal Emergency Charger
Like many of my IT writing colleagues I tend to carry a fair few gadgets around. Generally one or two phones plus one or maybe two smartphone/pda type devices. A camera. My iPod Classic. A laptop. It all adds up in terms of weight and bag clutter, and the last thing I want to add is oodles of cables.
That’s a reason I am a big fan of miniUSB and try to standardise my own personal kit on that wherever possible. Even though I know that at some point microUSB might rear its head as being the more widely used charging method, at least for mobile phones. If you aren’t up on that trend, David Meyer’s piece will enlighten you.
Whatever the charging connection of preference for a particular piece of kit, access to power is a basic requirement. When you don’t have that, the glue that binds your techy life together can come unstuck.
I’ve tried solar chargers aplenty in the past but they tend not to work well for me. So I decided to take a look at a portable battery. I chose Proporta’s Universal Emergency Charger.
It costs £34.95, a price which puts it just beyond ‘suck it and see’ level in my book. You need to know it is going to work before shelling out, I reckon. So I am here to tell you it does indeed work. And well.
It is small and light – smaller than an iPhone, and so easy to justify carrying on size terms. It comes with a retractable cable that is full sized USB at the battery end and compatible with a range of supplied charger heads at the other end: Nokia slim, Sony Ericsson, iPod, microUSB, Samsung and PSP. It is easy to use a standard miniUSB charger too if you’ve got one to hand (and who hasn’t?!)
The battery itself is charged from mains power via a cable that terminates in a full sized USB connector at the power end, so you’ll need a mains plug that can accommodate that. At the battery end the charger is a round pin which is a bit dispiriting. I’d have liked to use a standard USB cable to get juice into it and without that I need to carry the Proporta cable with me if I want to keep the battery topped up when mains power becomes available.
Charge lights on the front show how much juice is currently being stored and you can check this at any time. The battery stores 2500mAh of power.
So, how did it do on test?
Charging was a bit slow, though it is supplied partially charged so it can be used immediately. I left it on charge for 24 hours before trying it out. While it was charging I fully depleted the battery of my HTC Touch HD by getting it to play lots of music. The Proporta Universal Emergency Charger fully recharged the Touch HD and was nowhere near depleted after that task. I reckon it will do at least another half charge of the Touch HD.
A more real world test came this weekend. My HTC TyTN II was the phone of choice but as I left the house I discovered it was rather low on battery. Grabbing the Proporta Universal Emergency Charger I let it administer some power while I was travelling.
It was fortunate I’d fully juiced the charger up. I guess that’s another job to keep on top of.