Bah! You kids today! With your cell-a-ma-phones and i-ma-pods and hand held Nintendies! In my day, if we had something that ran on batteries, they were either double AAs or those weird watch batteries. When your device went dead, you’d bug your mom for new batteries. End of discussion. If you wanted one of them newfangled rechargeable batteries, you’d put it in the charger overnight and hope for the best.

Then sometime ’round double aught, all these rechargeable battery packs started popping up. They weren’t interchangeable, and they didn’t play nice with their neighbors. If you wanted to recharge them, you had to plug your whole device into the wall. And dabgummit if they didn’t all have different pluggy things, so you couldn’t share adaptors. Came the time when your average desk or entry way table looked like big ol’ plate of spagetti, what with the wires and the tangles and the cables and the hoo-ha!

Sorry, just talkin’ ’bout it gets my angry up. Lucky for us, those whippersnappers over at Callpod have a solution. It’s called the Chargepod and it looks like a cross between a hockey puck and an old fashioned donut. You plug one end into the wall (or car if you want to get fancy pants, charging things in your car like some kind of big britches) to get the juice flowing. Then you have six other ports. Simply buy the proper adaptor for your products and you can charge six things at once. They have adaptors for dang near everything that needs power, and you can order them special adapties from their website.

Of course, you might be asking yourself “Is this better than a surge protector and just plugging in the adaptors that already came with the product?” It’s a heck of a lot more portable, making it ideal for a frequent traveler. It’s small and streamlined, making it more organized than just having a heck of a bunch of wires all strung out willy-nilly, with no rhyme or reason. But it is a dang sight more expensive than a surge protector, and you can’t use it to charge a laptop or anything of similar power drain. I’m not the boss of how you spend your money. If you have a lot of things to charge and don’t want a big old powerstrip everywhere, it’s the thing for you.

Now get off my lawn!

To get your own Callpod Chargepod:Power OctopusClick Here

The Sun hates you. I realize that this is a fairly unpopular position, argued against by die hard Sun apologists. They’ll try to debunk this fact by stating that “It gives us the light and heat that we need to survive.” Fools! The light and heat pales in comparison to the flesh searing radiation the sun bounces at us. It is only by then benevolent grace of the Ozone Layer that the vile Sun doesn’t bleach all life from the Earth.

What if we could trick the Sun even further, get it to do more of our bidding while it tries in vain to murder us. Wouldn’t that be something? As it turns out, there are things called “Solar Pannels” avaliable to consumers. These pannels convert the Sun’s hate rays into usable electricity, powering your calculator or small toy cars.

But what if we could use our greatest foe’s power to run our portable electronics? Our cell phones and PDAs, our handheld game systems? Would that not be something?

Enter the Solio Classic Hybrid Solar Charger. Using a low profile three panel system and a collection of commonly used tips, the Solio keeps you running well past the limited battery life of your handheld device.

“But wait,” you may ask “doesn’t the Sun take a break from all his killing? What happens when it’s night out?” That is a fantastic question. Rather than act as a direct “sun to device” conduit, the Solio works best as a solar charger, filling it’s battery with murder beams and then sharing that power when you need it. It fills up a full charge quickly and folds into a small bundle for easy transport. You can leave it on your dashboard while you drive and when you need to hook up your equipment, it’s ready to go.

“But wait,” you may interrupt yet again, lacking respect for my narrative “I’m not the kind of person who goes outside very often. Or maybe I live in Seattle and have only heard rumors of this ‘Sun’ of which you speak. What do I do then?” I was getting to that. You need to relax and let this blog post happen. The “Hybrid” in the product name refers to the second way it can collect power. As you may know, USB allows devices to draw power from your computer without needing to be plugged in on their own. The Solio uses this technology to fill its battery using USB, allowing you to get all the power you need without leaving the house. Of course, you’ll want to use this on a desktop, not a free floating laptop, or else you’ll be looking at an empty laptop very quickly.

All in all, the Solio works wonders, giving me more time with my electronic devices while giving the finger to our hated Sun. It’s a win/win as far as I’m concerned.

• To get your own Solio charger Click Here
• To review special pricing on the Solio charger Click Here