Review: JavoEdge Pocket Battery Charger – Never Let It Die!

imageReview: JavoEdge Pocket Portable Battery Home Starter Kit
[rating:10]
Link: www.javoedge.com
Cost: Starting at $39.99 @ Javoedge.com

This has got to be one of the coolest devices that I have been fortunate enough to review. I will never leave home without it! This will prevent you from being in a situation where you need to make an important phone call, but the “battery too low for radio use” message just popped up.

When JavoEdge sent me their Portable Pocket Battery charger, I will admit that I was skeptical. Anything that sounds too good to be true usually is. I wasnt sure if this was actually going to charge my battery or if it would just allow it to run for a little while while plugged in. And while there are a couple of things about this device that can be a little bit annoying (more on that later) this is by far the “best in class”.

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The Kit that i was sent was the Pocket Portable Battery Home Starter kit. Inside the package was a bunch of goodies. The first was the Pocket Portable Battery itself, a USB charging cable, a Wall Charger, a Retractable Cable, and a travel-size carrying case. Everything, aside from maybe the plain old usb cable, is incredibly high quality. With the Home Starter Kit, they include one of their retractable cables ($14.95 value).

The unit itself is very self explanatory. On the bottom of the portable battery, there is an “in” and an “out”. To charge the portable battery itself, plug the mini-usb cable into the “in” port on the battery and connect the usb cable to either your computer or the included wall charger. The battery will let you know that it is charging by lighting up a little red dot. When it has fully charged the light will change to blue. You are ready to charge baby!

Now is the time that you toss this into your briefcase, purse, backpack, desk drawer, glovebox or wherever you will likely have it on hand and forget about it. The next time you are out and about and your blackberry battery starts blinking and beeping at you, pull the pocket charger out, and connect it to the retractable cable (or any usb cable for your device) and the other end into your Berry, push the button and let it do its magic.

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I have to mention the retractable cables separately. They are an editor’s choice all on their own. I have seen these several places before and thought that they were kind of hokey, but I was shocked. I ordered a couple more for my family, and even one for my iPod touch (yea yea I know flames are coming in the comments) So even if you have no need for the rechargeable battery, check out these little cables. They are less than 15 bucks and come in black and silver. It should be noted that the cables from JavoEdge are not the same poor quality as the retractable cables you have seen for 1.50 on ebay. Trust me.

I did some bench tests on this unit to see what kind of numbers I could realistically expect in the wild. It took about 3 hours to charge the portable battery from the wall unit from completely dead. This was a little bit longer than I had hoped for, but still less than the 5 hours that they had projected on their instruction sheet. I drained a spare 8800 to completely dead and plugged it in. The 8800 was 100% charged in 1 hour and 22 minutes. I drained the battery on the berry again and plugged it back in. It charged it to 85% before the portable battery was drained. So I got more than a charge and a half to my device off of one full charge. Pretty impressive!

Pros:

  • Tiny. This thing is smaller and thinner than my blackberry. I could easily slip this into my breast pocket and not know it was there.
  • Diverse. You can use this to charge practically anything you have with a battery, I will be using it to charge my Jawbone, Supertooth, iPod, BlackBerry and my digital camera.
  • Affordable. The units start off at $39.99 for the basic kit, which comes with the battery, case, and USB charger. I strongly reccommend bumping up to the $49.99 set which comes with the wall charger, retractable cable, and all of the charging interfaces you could possibly need. For only 10 bucks more you are getting about 25 dollars worth of extra stuff.

Cons:

  • Took a little bit longer to charge the battery than I would have liked. I would have been thrilled to see this down to an hour or hour and a half.

Summary

Buy this. Seriously buy it. Charge it up and put it away. You WILL need it and you will be happy that you decided to make an investment in it. You can use it for practically anything you own that charges. And you don’t have to worry about it becoming obsolete. There are so many uses for this device and it is worth every penny.

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