Solar-friendly Gadgets

Living in San Diego, you spend a lot of time at the beach. There, it's a tragedy to have no outlets to recharge things, while you have a lot of sun available. Ideally, you would use a solar charger to recharge all your devices while they are being used.

There are lots of chargers on the market. Solio makes very popular ones, but they are by far not the only vendor. Basically, all of them in one way or the other allow you to connect a variety of devices to a solar panel that outputs the correct power (voltage).

When buying a charger, you should look mainly for one thing: that the output is USB. Dedicated plugs are nice, but ultimately you'll end up connecting most devices via USB, so something that requires an adapter to get to USB requires you to carry something extra (Solio, for instance, mysteriously has output that looks like USB, but isn't. You need an adapter to translate to USB, which is really stupid. I assume it's done to have something else to make you lose and buy.

The devices, though, are a little more challenging, since there is more than one thing you have to look at.