Review: Personal Powerstation
Score:
62%
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It's every smartphone owner's nightmare. Your battery is on its last legs, you're on the move, on a bus, train or on foot, with no way of recharging from the mains or from a 12V car socket, and yet you need to stay in touch, making calls and perhaps sending emails. Or maybe you're the hardy type, exploring the wilder parts of the earth away from traditional electricity outlets? Either way, a way of generating your own power has got to be an interesting proposition.
There are several wind-up chargers on the market, but I plumped for the most expensive, I'm a sucker for bells and whistles. The Personal Powerstation is a combination phone charger, camera charger, torch and FM radio. The idea presumably being that in the cold, dark, wilds, you can call for help, stay informed and find your way around, all on hand-cranked battery power.
The Powerstation is fairly small, at 90mm by 55mm, and presented in a slightly cheap silvery plastic. The build quality is good without being great. The most important part, the winding handle, feels quite solid although the small dimensions mean that you can't get that much leverage for winding (of which more later).
A mode switch on one side (not shown here, along with the physical sockets for charging output) turns the torch on - with two bright LEDs, though there's room for several more, which would make a big difference - and also determines whether winding the crank merely charges the internal battery or whether it's for generating a voltage output.
On the other side is a basic FM radio, using a small telescopic aerial that only extends 15cm or so, which won't be a lot of use in the wilds. Surely an AM radio would have been a lot more sensible and just as cheap to build in? The FM solution needs a very strong signal to work properly. There's no explicit tuning, you just press 'Scan' until you hit the signal you want. A mono earphone socket is provided.
And so to the main event - being able to charge your smartphone miles from anywhere. The IWOOT sote claims '10 to 15 minutes talk time with 30 minutes of winding', which is fairly accurate, although there's a problem. The size of the crank and the resistance of the dynamo mechanism when 'under load' (i.e. your phone is sucking power out) means that winding can be hard going. I got to about 2 minutes before hand cramps set in. Now, maybe I'm just unfit and a bit of a wimp, but I challenge anybody to actually wind this crank for half an hour. Another, lesser problem is that you have to know 'how' to wind, starting quickly to get enough power into the connection that your smartphone doesn't immediately dismiss the link and pop up 'Not charging'. Once started successfully and 'Charging', you can reduce your cranking to the recommended one revolution per second.
The Personal Powerstation comes with a clever set of adaptors that let it charge Nokia, Motorola and Sony Ericsson phones, and if you reverse the main lead and stick it into the '6.0V' socket you can charge many popular digital cameras in the same way.
The idea behind this gadget is great and, to be fair, the implementation isn't at all bad. But ultimately it's the laws of physics which get in the way, with, simply, too much effort needed to get too little gain. Still, if there's a chance you will be stuck miles from anywhere, you could do worse than pack this in your rucksack.
Reviewed by Steve Litchfield at