Mobile accessories

The Powertraveller powermonkey-eXtreme is an on-the-go gadget charging kit that comprises a large solar panel and a 9,000mAh battery, although solar isn’t the only way to charge this particular portable power kit — it’ll also charge direct from AC mains or slurp up power from available USB power sockets. At the other end of it is a standard USB port and a custom DC charging socket, so it’s possible to charge two gadgets at once from the powermonkey.

The Plantronics Savor M1100 is certainly a slender-looking and lightweight mobile Bluetooth headset. In fact, at only 9g it’s astonishingly light, which aids it in being incredibly comfortable to wear for lengthy periods of time. During our test period, there were a couple of genuine instances where we had to hunt for it and couldn’t find it because we were already wearing it.

The Optus 3G Home Zone is a router add-on device containing a femtocell. A femtocell is a small radio base station that’s designed to boost mobile reception in your home or office; where it gets a little counter-intuitive is that it needs to piggyback onto your local broadband connection to do so. When you make a call through the femtocell, you’re essentially using VoIP — your mobile connects to the femtocell, which then routes the call to the Optus network via the internet.

Jawbone's latest premium-priced headset, the Era has an accelerometer built in, which is an interesting addition to an earpiece. The idea is that you can activate it not via buttons and toggles, but by tapping it (when it’s in your ear) or shaking it (when it’s not). Shaking to pair works really well, but we found the tapping motions can be a bit hit and miss.

Designed with sporty phone users in mind, the Plantronics BackBeat 903+ is a stereo Bluetooth headset that sits somewhere between being a full inner-ear blocking set and a set of buds, with adjustable tips that rotate to fit more snugly in the ear. The power button also doubles to let you know how much charge time is left, with a maximum of 7 hours. Hitting the play/pause button engages the inbuilt microphone. The idea here is that you’ve got the buds in your ears, but can pause music and hear conversation around you. The reality is a little more subtle.

The Padacs UltraCharge is a portable charger for mobile phones and other portable gadgets. It's not suitable for most notebooks, although you could use it to charge a low-power laptop such as netbook. The UltraCharge looks like the kind of battery pack you’d get on a standard notebook about five years ago. It features a 12,000mAh Lithium Polymer battery that charges with a somewhat alarming glowing power meter. There’s only a single button, but then all this does is supply power, so that’s all it needs. What it does come with multiples of are charging tips.