I got the Duracell PowerSource Mini back when ThingFling offered it in December 09.
I’m the type of person that feels compelled to write reviews on products I come to love, and I do, I love this little guy. My original reasons for getting it, I mentioned in my earlier post in this thread: All my day-to-day carry-around smaller gizmos presently, either directly charge by USB (by way of mini-USB ports), or have charging cables that end in a full USB plug. This is partly by design in selection on my part, and partly the industries overwhelming embrace of the USB standard as a viable power source provider as well on its usual data tasks. The convenience is clear, with USB being a standard specification, if your device can power from USB, you can assume you can charge it from just about anything that has a USB port, meaning then, any USB port is inherently a universal charger for your gear. When I travel, I bring a couple AC to USB power adapters and use those plus the free USB ports on my laptop to charge my myriad of devices. But I now carry the PowerSource mini with me in my pockets from day to day, and primarily use it to extend the battery usage times on my devices, as well charging them back up in a pinch.
The PowerSource Mini is fully designed by
Xantrex for Duracell, a fact openly mentioned several times in the included instructions. Xantrex is a Canada based company well known for its power inverters in particular. The PowerSource mini is, as the instructions say, “designed in Canada, Assembled in China.”
It’s a very solid little device, fits well in the palm, easily slipped into any pocket. It is roughly about the size of a deck of cards, just a bit wider. There are three ports on it, 2 outputs (meant for charging your stuff), and one input (meant for charging the PowerSource mini’s built in 3Ah(3,000mAh) Li-on Polymer battery). The two outputs are a standard female full sized USB port, and a male mini-USB swivel out arm. The input (aka the PowerSource minis charging port) is a small round plug, the type you typically find on most AC adapters, I don’t know the exact size. Initially, I was disappointed that the input plug was like this, because although the charging cable is the round plug on one end and a regular full sized male USB plug on the other end (IE, the PowerSource mini charges via USB itself) it just means one more cable you gotta keep track of and try not to lose. But after thinking about it for a minute or two, I could clearly see why they decided to do it this way: it differentiates the input plugs from the outputs. Sure, it’d have been more convenient had the input been its own, say, female mini-usb, but had it been, it’d make it confusing as to what ports were for what task. By differentiating the input from the outputs it is very clear what is meant for what. Sure they possibly could’ve designed circuitry with a switch control to switch one of the USB ports from a output to input role as needed, but this would’ve added unnecessary complexity, so overall, in the end, I quite like what they’ve done here.
The User Interface is as simple as you can get: there is one button on the face. Press it once to turn the device on (IE, it will begin to provide power to the output ports), and press it again to turn it off. There is a central blue LED under the power button that lights when on. There is a secondary LED just below the power button that can light green, amber, or red as relevant. This LED is the power level status indicator and at any one time will let you know exactly the power level, and what the status of the PowerSource mini is: When you’re charging the PowerSource mini, it blinks green up to and until the built-in Li-on Polymer battery is fully charged. When you have the PowerSource mini on and feeding power to your devices, the indicator LED will light along with the power LED to indicate the present battery level. Green means there’s plenty of charge still, amber means the capacity is low, and finally, red means the battery is almost depleted, and the PowerSource mini will automatically be shutting down in ten seconds in order to protect its internal battery (you don’t want to run the battery completely dead, this is not good for it in the long run).
Since the PowerSource mini charges by USB (via included charging cable) it can be charged by any USB port, including the ones on your computers, and comes included with both an AC adapter for plugging into the wall and a car adapter for plugging into your car’s cigarette lighter socket. Know this: the AC adapter and car adapter are not exclusive chargers to the PowerSource mini—they are both USB chargers with a female full USB plug on them. Which means that you can also use them to directly power any of your USB chargeable devices. So for example, if your cellphone charges by way of USB, if you buy this kit, you not only will get a battery extender, but also a car charger and extra wall charger for your phone as well.
My PowerSource mini was ready to go straight out of the package, it still had a charge on it (and was in the green level as indicated by the indicator LED) mostly thanks to its Li-on Polymer battery and partly thanks to the fact that these are fairly recently built devices. There is a prominent manufactured on date on the back side of them, mine was assembled on November 8th, 2008, meaning this is certainly not old stock as is fairly often the case with many Deal of the Day sites. One of the great characteristics of Lithium ion Polymer batteries, is that they have relatively low self discharge as compared to say, regular NiMH batteries. I’m not exactly sure of the figure, but I believe I heard that Li-on Polymer cells will self discharge only about 10% per year. Which is awesome in a device like this, it means you can charge it, then throw it in your bag and be reasonably sure it will still have a good charge whenever you need it. If you’ve ever been disappointed to find that your NiMH batteries completely discharged themselves unusable in a month’s time of non-use… Well, this is a great liberating feeling from all that! (I’ve mostly replaced my fleet of NiMH cells with LSD Eneloops… Expensive even at sale prices, but so worth it.)
Speaking of the backside—a feature I really like about the PowerSource mini is that it has rubber feet on the back. It doesn’t sound like much, really until you realize this means you can pretty much put it down on any mostly flat surface while it charges your gizmos, and it will stay in place without sliding.
OK, so how does it work? One word: awesome. In my usage, I have been using it to charge/extend battery life on my HTC TouchPro 2 phone, recharge my Meizu MP3 player, recharge/extend battery on my GPS navigation device, and a plethora of other uses as they come up. The instruction sheet has a small chart of typical recharge times for specific devices and it is as follows:
Device Recharge Time
iPOD 14 hours (<-that seems odd!)
iPOD mini 2.5 hours
iPOD nano 2 hours
Blaxkberry 2.25-2.5 hours
Palm One PDA 5.5 hours
I have been informally keeping an eye on battery run time as I go through my daily usage, and have been utterly impressed. Last week, I was in for a day of doctor appointments, so yes, mostly a waiting room day. I was using WMWifiRouter on my phone, which is a program that makes use of the wifi capability of your phone and shares the cellular internet out to other wifi devices like your laptop. Essentially making your phone an on demand wifi router and hot spot. Awesome, and cool, but the combination of having the wifi radio on, and cellular radio going full blast, as well the computational power usage, makes it a huge power drain. Normally I can expect a couple hours use doing this on my phone’s main battery. So this was a perfect way to give my PowerSource mini a real trying test. So before I began, I plugged my phone into the PowerSource mini by way of the mini-USB arm, turned it on, set WMWifirouter going on my phone, then hopped on my netboook… This is a good time to offer a usage/pro tip: If you know, like I did in that situation, that you’re gonna need the extra power of the PowerSource mini, go ahead and plug in right off the bat. Basically, your device will think when plugged into the mini that it is simply attached to a wall source or whatever. Your phone will report it is plugged in. If your devices main battery is already full then the PowerSource mini will act like a trickle charger, just topping off power as its used and directly powering the device as you use it. If the main battery is low then the device will be in charging mode which draws more current from the PowerSource mini, and you lose more power in the transmission than if it was just trickling current. So if you plug it in immediately you should notice longer run times than if you just ran the device till dead then plugged in the mini to charge and power it.
Anyway, it was on and off as needed as I went to and from the waiting room, but I would say total accumulative time I got from the PowerSource mini was about 5 hours until it hit the amber low power condition. Which is in my opinion an AWESOME runtime in this usage, but what was remarkable was that at the point it turned off from power depletion, I checked my phones main battery level.. The PowerSource mini had kept it topped off to 90% (!!) meaning I still had an almost full charge on my phone, so I could’ve still gotten another 2 hours or so out of it had I needed (It was time to go home.)
Here’s another extremely unscientific runtime test: When I first got it I was trying to think of a good device to try it out with, and see how long it could go. Well—I have a pair of those USB powered Woot-off revolving lights… Seemed like a perfect test, I mean I figured, okay, probably low power usage just by virtue that they run on 5Volt USB, but at the same time.. two continuous bright LEDs with a motor in each light constantly spinning the reflector disc. So, after fully charging the PowerSource mini, I plugged in the lights and turned it on. They lit immediately as usual, so I noted the time, and let them spin, and spin… and spin. Total runtime in the end? 16.5 hours. (!!)
I have fully charged my Meizu MP3 player from dead to full with the PowerSource mini, I can’t say how much juice it took from the mini, but I can tell you the mini did the job, and still reported a good power level with the green indicator.
It’s also a rather intelligent device with many fail-safes that automatically shut it off in bad situations, including over-voltage protection, and thermal shutoff for if the battery is getting too hot. These are great safety precautions and measures that will prevent damage to your attached devices should anything cataclysmic transpire, but too, is just plain the sign of a well engineered quality device.
I think that’s just about all I can say, aside from I think it’s an attractive looking device, and that it has vents for the battery on the top edge as well bottom. The mini=USB arm, as well, has a nice little indention, so you can easily swing it out, it when tucked away stays very snug in place. So I will leave it there, and simply say, I totally recommend this. If you have ANY day to day USB chargeable devices you carry, you will love this, every aspect of it. If you’re on the fence, that means you think it could be useful to you, so let me tell you in no uncertain means: it is. Get off the fence and buy it, you will love it. There are products of this ilk that have even higher battery capacity, you could look through dealextreme.com, for example, and find one easily. But for the price ThingFling is offering the PowerSource mini, you’re getting a remarkably high quality, well engineered, top notch and dependable device for a very pleasing price. I don’t really think that you can beat it.