While on most days I’m content to use a battery case or cradle and the resulting doubling or tripling of my iPhone’s battery life, on my recent cross country road trip I found that keeping my iPhone charged at my bedside overnight, or even keeping it charged at a hotel desk all day without tying up my laptop’s USB ports, was a frequent challenge. So I often fell back on an external battery brick, which was handy, but even it had to be recharged via USB, which meant plugging it into my laptop at some point (or traveling with a third party wall charging brick). But the ZAGGsparq, with its built in wall charging capability would have changed that equation: charge it by day via a wall plug, then leave my iPhone plugged into it on the nightstand at night. Everyone has their own iPhone and iPod usage patterns, so I’m sure some you can think of ways in which you’d put it to use.

But while the concept is nice, it’s the brute-force amount of battery life that makes the ZAGGsparq worth toting around despite its large size: while the company claims it’ll quadruple your iPhone’s battery life, my two full cycles with the product suggest that ZAGG’s estimate is conservative, as it basically quintupled things for me. Now that’s some real power. I do wish there were a way to recharge the ZAGGsparq via a computer for those times when doing so is desirable, but beyond that there’s little to quibble with here: if you want a long-lasting battery brick that easily recharges from a wall socket and can recharge two devices at once, here’s your winner. I can’t wait to use this one on my next cross-country flight. Please lose the big yellow logo, though. And our rating would have been higher if the price weren’t so exceedingly high.

As you might expect, the price point brings some compromises with it. While the $129 ZAGGsparq offers a mind-blowing 6000 mAh of battery life, and form-fitting battery cradles typically offer 1800 to 3300 mAh, the Charge & Sync+ offers a mere 1400, putting it barely above the svelte Juice Pack Air battery case. What 1400 mAh means is that the Charge & Sync+ will not-quite-double your iPhone’s battery life, or if your iPhone’s battery is dead to begin with, not quite charge it up to full. For this price, I’ll take it.

Further attempting to push the value quotient, the Charge & Sync+ not only comes with an iPhone/iPod connector cable (several more expensive batteries inexplicably don’t), the cable is actually built in to the brick. Unfortunately this is an instance of a product outsmarting itself, as extending the cable requires undoing the kind of plastic trap door that you’d have to pop open to change the AA batteries in an alarm clock; not something you want to be fiddling with every time you go to use the product. And in a head scratching move, the built in electrical prongs can’t be extended until the cable has been unwrapped – meaning you have to go through all the trap door hoopla just to charge up the brick itself, let alone connect it to your device. It’s nice that they’ve included separate tips for charging mini and micro USB devices, but the cable implementation is so befuzzled that I’d rather have seen then go with a simple USB port and a separate cable. As such it’s a three star product that gets bumped up half a star for being a good value play despite the flawed concept.

Enter the Pocketpal by MiLi, a USB wall charger which attempts to offer the best of both worlds in that it’s about as small as the current bundled iPhone wall charger but offers retractable prongs which disappear into the body of the charger when not in use. And in a move away from the all-white chargers offered by Apple and most third parties, the Pocketpal comes in five different two-tone color combinations; my test unit is black with bright blue trim.

In short, the Pocketpal works equally well for use with an iPhone or an iPod (any iPod model except the shuffle). It doesn’t come with a cable, but that merely presumes you’re going to use the cable that came with your iPhone or iPod. I’d like the prongs to be a little easier to flip out, as I had to use both thumbs simultaneously, but that got easier the more I got used to it.

So why not a higher rating? The wall charger I’d been using, from RadTech, only costs ten dollars and has prongs that are a little easier to flip out (the RadTech charger also comes with two USB ports for $15). Then again, the RadTech charger is quite a bit larger and very generic looking; the Pocketpal, while not matching my iPhone or any of my iPods stylistically, has its own sense of stylishness. So if you want a small retractable wall charger in your choice of colors, and don’t mind paying a bit of a premium for the privilege, MiLi’s Pocketpal is an easily recommendable option.

Now here comes the followup in the form of the Gum Plus, which is largely the same product in terms of specs, but the black plastic styling has been completely replaced with an aluminum body wrapped with a black stripe which not-so-subtly resembles my MacBook Pro laptop. As a user of Apple products this makes me happy. And with so many PC laptops now borrowing similar styling, it’ll probably fit in well on that side of the fence as well. Of course the catch is that the Gum Plus is a battery for your iPhone or iPod, not your laptop, and while it does match the various silver-colored iPod models, it doesn’t match the iPhone or iPod touch stylistically at all.

Of course looks are secondary to what you might actually use it for, and this is more of a product for keeping your iPhone or iPod charged overnight next to your bed, and a power outlet isn’t handy; trying to actually walk around throughout your day with a brick like this plugged into your iPhone isn’t going to fly. But the Gum Pro / Gum Plus does represent the best value I’ve seen yet, by far, when it comes to this kind of battery, and quadrupling your iPhone’s battery life is nothing to sneeze at.

review by Bill Palmer

Car chargers are car chargers, right? Pick the one with the best price, or the most attractive styling, or the brand name you feel the most comfortable with, and be done with it. That’s the logic that has held true for iPhone and iPod car charging products for years. While we’ve seen variations with aux ports and dual-device ports over the years, the bottom line is that it’s not been a complicated equation; at the end of the day you’re going to have a bulbous entity protruding from your car’s power socket. Except wait a minute, those bulbous protrusions are suddenly no more, thanks to new products Belkin and Kensington.



I don’t know how they did it, and I don’t care. It makes me wonder, sarcastically, if the big bulgy blobs on the front of every iPod or iPhone charger to come to market were just there for show. Because now all the sudden the big bulbs are no longer part of the equation. Instead these new car chargers, once plugged in, sit nearly flush with the lip of your car’s power socket, making them essentially invisible during use. And based on my tests, there’s no tangible difference during use. They don’t take longer to charge your device than the oversized car chargers do, and while I’d been skeptical about whether it might be tricky to remove the tiny stubs from the power socket, it turns out they each stick out just enough millimeters to be yanked out easily with your fingertips.



It’s very rare that we hand out five star ratings for any product as inexpensive as these, as a sub-$20 price tag nearly always means some corner was cut somewhere. But these devices are game-changers. With the exception of chargers that offer additional ports or functionality, there’s now no reason to recommend any car charger that isn’t as tiny as these. The two products are nearly identical. But if we were handing out awards (actually, we will be soon), I’d give the nod to the Kensington because in addition to the $19 charger-plus-cable product, there’s also a $9 charger-only option and a $29 charger-plus-cable-plus-wall-charger combo package. But you can’t go wrong with the Belkin product either.

Learn more about the Kensington charger at Kensington.com.

Learn more about the Belkin charger at Belkin.com.

review by Bill Palmer

Ever since the iPhone launched two-plus years ago, power users have been gunning for additional battery life from wherever they can get it. That’s come primarily in the form of three types of products: form-fitting batteries that enshroud the iPhone in a cradle or case; slim rectangular batteries that snap onto the iPhone’s bottom, and standalone batteries that connect to the iPhone via a cable. The latter two have generally been considered a poor man’s version of the former, since they’re cheaper (in the $50 range, as opposed to $80-$100 for a cradle or case), and can’t be used in a manner all that practical when the iPhone is either in the user’s hand or pocket.



But if a standalone battery is going to break that rule, the Gum Pro from Just Mobile shows precisely how: with a metric ton of additional battery life that you can’t get from any form-fitting iPhone battery of any size. Battery life on the iPhone can be complicated to quantify in terms of hours due to its various functionalities (and combinations of those functions), but the Gum Pro with its 4400mAh can more or less quadruple the battery life you get from your iPhone’s internal battery; these claims were verified by the fact that I could recharge my nearly-drained iPhone via the Gum Pro three times in a row without charging the Gum Pro (which itself charges via USB).



It connects via USB to your iPhone and more or less sits beside it (you could toss the two of them connected together into a backpack, but not realistically shove them into your pocket while connected), meaning that it’s less for charging your iPhone while you’re using it and more about charging it up while your iPhone is sitting somewhere idly.



Examples? Charging your iPhone each night of a hiking trip. Getting you through a power outage. Lunch break at a conference. And so on. The Gum Pro isn’t exactly tiny, being about twice as thick as the iPhone, nearly as wide, two-thirds as tall, and a little heavier than the iPhone itself. But it’s a compact enough shape that it doesn’t feel overly bulky for what it offers. The lack of a wall charging brick or even an iPhone sync cable (you can use your own) feels like a cheap omission, but that’s my only complaint. The first non-form-fitting battery to receive more than four stars from us.

Learn more about the Gum Pro at Just-Mobile.com

review by Bill Palmer

The old sports adage is that if you’re not the most talented player on the field then you need to make up for it in other ways, by working harder, studying more film, and so on. The same could be said for Dexim’s BluePack S3 external battery. It’s not a form-fitting battery case or cradle that can charge your iPhone while it’s in your hand or your pocket. And as far as standalone batteries go that sit next to your iPhone or iPod and connect via USB, the Bluepack S3 can do a little more than double the life of a fully charged iPhone, which is barely half what you can do with the similarly priced competing Gum Pro. So just how does the S3 manage to earn four stars out of five? Like the slow running back or the weak-armed quarterback, the S3 makes up the difference with a slew of intangibles that come in handy in a variety of ways.


Actually, those “intangibles” are easily identifiable. Its shape is nearly the same as the iPhone itself, just a little shorter and a tad narrower – meaning that, like the iPhone, the S3 will slide easily into your pocket. Not that you can put it to good use in your pocket, but you’ll have it with you once you get there. Provided, of course, that you take the included iPhone/iPod connector cable with you, which is easy enough to do since it’s only about four inches long. And the word “included” is important as well, as the S3 actually comes with an iPhone cable, as opposed to the Gum Pro. But the S3 doesn’t stop there, far from it in fact. Also included are mini-USB and micro-USB cables for using the S3 to charge other kinds of devices (digital cameras, BlackBerry, etc). It even comes with a carrying sack along with a wall charging brick that sports two additional USB ports so you can use the combination of cables to charge up multiple devices at once. The USB charging cable (for recharging the S3 via your computer) is even a dual-USB cable, meaning that you can connect it to two USB ports on your computer at once so it’ll recharge faster (although it recharges just fine if you’ve only got one USB port available).



The battery unit also has a small flashlight built-in just in case (and come to think of it, where are the Ginsu knives?). The BluePack S3 is basically a three-star battery that gets bumped all the way up to four stars by including a slew of useful add-ons.

Learn more about the BluePack S3 at Dexim.net