During our trip to London and CES last month we took with us a Duracell portable charger which held 1800mAh of emergency power for up to two connected devices (via its built-in full-scale USB ports).
We have to say that despite the odd grumble the chargers were an absolute God send and without them we couldn’t have taken as many shots with our cameras, checked our emails as frequently or simply saved space in our luggage from not having to carry around loads of bulky chargers for the various pieces of kit we had in our possession.
Design
In terms of design the charger is certainly slim-line and was able to fit in our pocket or bag without taking up too much space.
The charger also comes adorned in the standard Black and Golden corporate colours of Duracell, so it has esthetic qualities as well.
To the front of the charger is a handy switch that can be pressed to indicate how much power the charger has remaining (this is indicated by three bars) and directly below this are two full-scale USB ports which can be used to charge two pieces of tech simultaneously.
We also liked that the mains plug attaches directly to the charger so this makes it a little more compact, however the two mains plugs you get (1 x European and 1 x UK) could have benefited from being fold out plugs which would have made it truly portable.
Our only gripe with the design is that when the mains plugs are not attached to the unit the two prongs that are used to lock the latter into place do tend to protrude slightly from the casing which could get caught on your clothing. Personally we did not have the problem, but its something to note none the less.
Package Contents
As well as the charger and the aforementioned Euro and UK adaptors you do get a small USB cable with a 1 x mini USB or 1 x micro USB adapter to connect your devices. It would have been great if the charger had come with a few more connectors thrown in such as an iPhone/iPad connecter as it meant we had to lug around our iOS cable on top of the latter. On a positive side this is the first adapter that worked with both our iPad 2 and iPhone (at the same time we must add) which is something we have not seen from portable chargers before as Apple products are normally really fussy as to what can charge them. So this is a big bonus in our eyes.
Charging Times
Charging the battery pack takes roughly two hours or just under depending on what level of charge is already in the device, but it then provides 1800mAh of power output which is enough to provide an iPhone 4 with up to 5 hours of extra talk time.
You can - if you wish - charge up the portable charger (via the mains) whilst charging your devices at the same time, which is useful.
However we did notice a few issues with doing this, in that if you had the devices plugged in at the same time as flipping the switch on the mains it would not work. What you had to do is plug the charger into the mains first and then turn it on and connect your devices second.
Also some devices did not like being charged together when being plugged into the mains, such as a Digital camera and iPad 2. Possibly because one is more power hungry than the other.
In terms of extra power we noticed that our iPad 2 got an extra 50%+ charge from the charger, but this was at the same time as being connected to a wireless router and uploading images to Twitter. While on other devices like our iPhone 3Gs we went from 15% to full if we left it alone to charge).
We also remember running low on batteries with our Samsung Galaxy S II and with only one bar remaining on the charger we managed to get the Samsung back to working order so we could use the flash to take more shots (the Samsung flash gets disabled if the battery runs to low).
At £40 rrp the charger is expensive, but their official distributor (Amazon) are selling these at £30 now which is a little cheaper, but for us the chargers are a must have purchase when traveling away from the home or office.
