Koss 76 manual Power on the GO

POWER ON THE GO

And six devices may not mean six chargers. If one of the devices you carry is a laptop computer (you’re unlikely to buy the iGo otherwise), it’s possible that other devices can be recharged by simply plugging them into the laptop’s USB connector. That’s true of the iPod, and it’s also true of the Palm Tungsten handheld (though not of the Life Drive). Indeed, the Palm and iPod travel char- gers are substantially identical: plug-in cubes with USB jacks.

And the iGo Everywhere may not make your luggage lighter. We weighed all six chargers we wanted to replace and came up with a total of 762 grams. The weight of the iGo with its cords, except the optional car cord? It was 738 g, and that didn’t include the six adapter tips.

But weight isn’t everything. If we had measured the kilometers of tangled cord on each of our adapters, it would have put the iGo way ahead. What’s more,

It struck us when we were packing up to go to Vegas for CES and T.H.E.Show: each year we need more and more chargers to go

anywhere.

Not all of our chargers are related to audio, to be sure, though some of them are. Two of us went along to cover the shows (see Vegas 2006 in UHF No. 75), and we actually brought along no fewer than seven chargers! Count ’em: an iPod, a Palm Life Drive (which is a video players among other things), a Palm Tungsten T, an Apple iBook, a Pentax Optio digital camera, and two telephones (Siemens and Motorola). We wondered what all those boxes and wires would look like on an airport X-ray screen!

Which is why the iGo Everywhere Dual Power 130, shown above, grabbed our attention. It promised to replace all of our chargers except the one for the camera (the Optio battery unfortunately, can’t be recharged in the camera). It comes in two parts. The larger box can charge laptop computers. The smaller add-on box, which is an option but is included in the package we got, can charge the iPod, phones and other small products. Your main problem will be rounding up the adapters for everything you own, but with the company’s help we

got ’em all, even the one for a Motorola P280 phone, which took a little longer.

There’s one down side: the iGo can recharge all six devices, but not all at once. On the plus side, you can travel worldwide with it, because it adjusts itself to whatever voltage is in the wall.

Each device of course requires its own adapter tips, and in our case that meant six adapters. The vinyl iGo carrying pouch has a pocket for adapters, but good luck figuring out that “A20” is what you need for a Motorola phone. We picked up one of those dollar store giant pill boxes, with seven compartments for the days of the week, and relabelled them.

Do you need one?

Not everyone travels with as many devices as we do. Six chargers is a lot, whereas three or four may be a bearable number.

And how many power chargers do you travel with?

rounding up our six chargers means get- ting down on hands and knees to unplug them, and the danger of forgetting a charger for a critical device is very real.

What it costs

As we went to press we didn’t have official list prices, so we relied on iGo’s on-line store (www.igo.com), and in Canada, the catalog for The Source. The unit we have seems to sell for US$150/C$190, with adapter tips going for US$10/C$12. Considering the going price for just a charger for a modern laptop, that’s not bad. And street prices may be well below that.

An alternative?

At the same time we saw the iGo, we also looked at an interesting universal charger from a company called MFuel. It’s called the Universal Power Bank, and there was a picture of it in our Vegas report in UHF No. 75.

The MFuel device can also charge everything you’ve got, but it can do more. It has its own rechargeable battery, and it can power those devices, to give you extra usage far from a power source. We asked for a review sample and got no reply. Since Vegas, its price rose from US$300 to $400.

Our guess, however, is that it weighs a lot more than 738 grams!

ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine 49

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