Solar Technology Supercharger Full Review
Posted: 07 May 2008 by Adam Vaughan
We love solar-powered chargers. These portable gadgets, such as the Freeloader, Solio Magnesium edition and more, offer us free, green electricity whether we're on a Cornish beach or in the back garden. What's not to like? Well, in the UK, our main gripe is speed, since there are so few hours of good sunlight in a day. Because these chargers are designed to be pocket-friendly, most of them have small solar panels and often take more than a day to power up from the sun.
Enter the Supercharger. Available in lurid green or shocking pink, it's a solar panel accessory that plugs into the Freeloader and theoretically halves the time it takes to charge the Freeloader's battery. How so? Simple -- it has larger solar panels. Where the Freeloader is rated at 0.66 watts peak (the potential power of its panels), the Supercharger clocks in at twice the power with 1.5 watts peak.
The official spec says the panel should fill the Freeloader battery to full in just four hours. Once full, the battery can then power an iPod for 18 hours or a mobile phone for 44 hours, though obviously that depends on the model.
Handily, the solar panel is also easy to attach to your existing backpack, bicycle panniers or any other bag big enough to take it
As we've pointed out in our Freeloader review, the lack of a charge indicator on the Freeloader battery means it's impossible to see how much juice it has inside. Still, even without an indicator for carrying out accurate tests, our experience is that the Supercharger charges the battery much faster than the Freeloader's standard solar panels. After a weekend of charging, we had enough power in the battery to power up two Nokia N-Series phones from half full to full, and a 5.5G iPod from three-quarters full to full. Continue reading...
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