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.

Is USB the New Outlet?

I just got a refurbished Garmin Edge 705 (review to follow) along with a bunch of craptastic free sample gadget from China. The thing they had in common? Instead of having dedicated chargers, they all came with an AC/DC converter to USB.

It used to be that you were flooded with dozens of different chargers. After a while, you'd forget which charger belonged to which gadget and you had to label them. Every time you'd move, then, you'd have this monstrous mess of chargers that you couldn't get rid of, because you had long forgotten what gadgets they belonged to.

There were craptastic adaptable chargers with dip switches for current and voltage and different tips. You constantly risked destroying your gadget by choosing the wrong voltage, so they were really just an item of last resort. It was a nightmare.