There are a ton of solar-charging power packs around but I find the Solartab an interesting and stylish one that might work well for camping trips and motorhomes.
Solartab portable solar charger
It’s not light (2.6 pounds / 1.2 KG) but that’s because it’s got a nice 48 Wh lithium polymer battery inside (13000 mAh and I assume the ‘normal’ 3.7V cells) and it comes with a protective case. The panel is designed right into the battery and the whole unit looks very stylish. The 5.5 W monocrystalline panel is not big enough to charge the unit in anything less than 3 full-sun days (my estimate) and that’s if you keep the unit constantly pointing at the sun, at the right angle so look at this as a battery pack that has a solar top-up feature. If the charging electronics are well designed (with ‘smart’ features that can help trickle-charge a Lithium Polymer battery) then this might work better than using a separate power-pack and panel.
There’s two USB outputs on the unit that supply 1.0 and 2.1A output, micro-USB charging, an LED charge/ capacity indicator system and the cover is made of polyurethane.
At $119 its cheaper than my current favorite, the Changers solar kit, and it has way more battery capacity but if it doesn’t charge in low-sunlight and you live somewhere like me, in Germany, then you might be better off just buying $119 worth of power packs and charging them from the mains. $119 will buy you over 200 Wh of USB power packs at Amazon.com right now.
As I said, treat this as a battery with solar top-up capabilities and consider it for camping, motorhome or balcony use and not as a complete mobile solar charging solution.
With a number of alreadyavailable or soon to be launched Honeycomb tables equipped with full-sized USB ports, I’m hoping that we’ll see the trend continue. Current devices have an issue though; only one USB port! For devices like the Slider, which lacks a trackpad or other form of mouse, that one USB port is likely to be taken up by an external mouse for a desktop-like experience, leaving no room for other peripherals such as external HDD’s, flash drives, game controllers, etc.
Thankfully, Google is rather smart and built a lot of standard connectivity into Android 3.1+ which means a bunch of USB accessories work without modification, including USB hubs for connecting multiple USB devices through a single port.
Jerry was kind enough to test a number of USB hubs with his Acer Iconia A500 and here’s what he found:
Note: USB 1.x hubs don’t seem to work with Honeycomb!
I also came across a super small 4-port hub which looks like it would be perfect to throw in a bag along with your tablet. We haven’t tested it, but it’s USB 2.0 which all of the tested USB hubs are.
This site calls it the “World’s smallest USB 2.0 4-port hub inch though in the description they say it’s “Probably inch the world’s smallest. Nevertheless, it is indeed tiny! Check it out:
