Macally PowerLink Emergency Battery Pack with 2 GB Pen Drive for iPod and iPhone (Black)
by Macally
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Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Macally PowerLink Emergency Battery Pack with 2 GB Pen Drive for iPod and iPhone (Black)
Customer Review: Macally PowerLink Emergency BatteryPack - Works As Promised, And Includes Nice Extras
Summary: 4 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
The Macally PowerLink Emergency BatteryPack with 2 GB Pen Drive is a nice product that is well designed for it's purpose. For it's intended primary use, this device works as advertised. This is meant to be an emergency charger for your iPod or iPhone, not an infinite source of power. Depending on your specific model iPhone or iPod, you can expect between 30 minutes and 4 hours of emergency power. Obviously many of the newer and larger capacity models use much more power.
PROS:
+ Great emergency power source for your iPhone or iPod in a pinch
+ Nice compact size is definitely small enough for your pocket or purse
+ Integrated 2 GB USB flash drive is a nice and logical extra since you are plugging it in to recharge it anyway
+ Intuitive and easy to use - just plug it in
+ Also doubles as a convenient charger / sync cable with the USB extension; one less charger cable to carry
+ iPods capable of being used as external storage can also show up as a seperate drive when PowerLink is left *ON* and connected
+ Lights display your charge level so you know how much longer you have
+ USB connector light tells you when the connection is good
+ On / off switch also works clearly and conserves the battery power
+ Compatible with most iPod and iPhone models
CONS:
- Caps do not clip onto the device and can easily be misplaced
- The square edge around the iPod connector makes a tight fit when you have a skin or case on your iPod
- 2 GB capacity prevents this from being the primary flash drive for many
- When in use the device does get hot
- Slightly more expensive than most iPod cable adapters or emergency chargers
FEATURES
While it's easy to discount the device's usefulness for including a 2 GB flash drive, this is one case where the extra feature actually fits with its core purpose. Since you're plugging it in to charge it anyway, being able to use it as a USB drive as well is a very nice extra.
And with the included USB extender cable, this can also replace your iPod sync and charge cable in a pinch. I'm not sure many people have realized this can be used for that purpose, but carrying one less cable with you for work or travel is definitely a useful function. So for me at least, the 3 features included with device are well designed together.
As an added extra, not only will this device show up as a USB drive when connected to your computer, but if left in the ON position it will also let your iPod connect as a seperate device for external storage. Not all iPod models have this feature enabled, but for 5G video iPods this is a very nice extra. And if you don't want your iPod to connect but rather only to charge, simply keep the PowerLink in the *off* position before connecting it via the USB extender.
So how does it perform? As an emergency power source the performance will necessarily vary depending on your specific model of iPhone or iPod. The iPhone 3G and Apple iPod touch use more power than an Apple iPod nano 3G. So it's understandable that some people might not be impressed with the performance after testing it on only one device.
As somebody that has more units than I can count, I was able to test this with several iPods including an Apple 80 GB iPod (5.5 Generation), classic, nano and touch. I was able to squeeze almost an extra hour out of my iPod Touch and Classic and several hours out of my iPod Nano. So for me, this has been a resounding success.
Where this device does perhaps deserve some criticism is in a few design details that could have been improved. The fact that you have a two sided device protected by caps on both sides that cannot be clipped back anywhere on the device is a silly oversight. I'm sure there are ways to jury rig this device to tether the caps but that shouldn't be necessary on a newer item.
Still in context, the pros definitely outweigh the cons.
CONCLUSION
I commute and travel a lot for work, and not having to worry as much about my battery running out is a huge convenience. And it's also very nice to not have to pack my sync cable and wall charger on trips, either of which is much bulkier than this device and the USB extender cable.
As a very thrifty person, I would tend to be somewhat critical of a device that costs a premium over the competition. In this case, I think the performance and well integrated extras of this device are well worth the premium. Everybody has their own value on what an extra 30 minutes to an hour of iPod use is worth to them. But for those with an iPhone, being able to finish an important call while on the go is a huge positive. This is one of those things that you value much more on the rare occasion that you really need it.
This device is so simple that it's easy to underestimate what goes into designing and producing something like this. I for one am very happy with mine. I recommend it.
Enjoy.
Customer Review: Not for iPods Only
Summary: 5 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
"Macally PowerLink 3-1n-1 Battery Pack/Data Sync/Flash Drive."
UPDATE: OK, to keep it honest, I have been using this little gizmo more than I expected, and while most of my comments still stand, it is proving to be quite handy. I still fear losing the caps, and ultimately the thing itself, but it in the meantime it has been rather helpful after all.
And I now give it a 5-star upgrade because today it went through the dreaded Washing Machine Torture Test (and a few minutes in the dryer), and after a few hours in the sun, seems to be working fine!
Whenever I hear the phrase "Three In One" I only think of one thing: oil. Before WD-40 became the ubiquitous King of Squeak, there was the little tin can with the red cap found on everybody's repair shelf. As everyone knows "WD" stands for "water displacement". How WD managed to also displace 3-in-1 is a mystery.
It's also a mystery just exactly what niche this product is supposed to fill. I must confess I am an iPod user only at this time, and evaluate the product strictly from that perspective- I feel if I were using this with a phone I would be writing a different review.
It is an attractive little thing, better looking than the photos. About the size of a pack of gum, it has an on/off switch for the battery, four tiny function LED's, and a cap at each end to protect the connector when not in use, and to be promptly and permanently lost the first time of use.
Having newly entered the iPod universe, at first this seemed like a handy little gadget to have around. And I am compelled to say I am only a recreational user of the device, so my comments are a bit biased. After a few days use with this device, I am hard pressed to predict where it what the primary role would be.
As a flash drive, OK. A data sync connector- won't a simple cable take care of that? And a battery backup? I can see why this would be terrific for an iPhone user, but I would have to really think hard to imagine a situation where the trauma of a dead Pod battery would be soothed by an emergency battery infusion. Or, to be actually in that situation of need, but have had the foresight to also carry along this little thing. At 6/10 of an ounce, and slick looking it's hardly inconvenient, but is also hardly necessary. And like a multi-function office machine, if you lose one device, you lose all three.
For charging and flash drive use, I first tried it on my main workstation, a Win98 relic. The battery charge light went to full, so that seemed to work. No connectivity to the flash drive, which did not surprise me. I emailed Macally to ask about a driver, and received a prompt response:
"Thank you for contacting us.
I am sorry that we do not have the Win98 driver, and we don't know whether it need or not, because the 98 has been face out from Microsoft."
I have always felt I had a "face out" relationship with Microsoft, too. But, it did recognize the device and seemed to charge it fully.
On the XP machine, it worked fine. Immediately shows up as a new drive, and for some reason contained a "New Microsoft Word Document", blank.
It was interesting to notice the sparse instructions "Specifications" section, the "talk time" had been stickered over to read "one hour". Diligent scraping reveals the original time was "25 Min". Upgrades are good.
Connecting it to a partially discharged Pod, the level immediately jumps to Full. So, in the name of an accurate review, I ran my Pod down to flat, and had a go.
Plugged it in and got the very dim "Charging, Please Wait" screen. The Macally's charge LED dropped down one point. Four minutes later the iPod woke up and the battery icon showed full. I resumed the play-test and saw that not surprisingly, lost the shuffle mix. I decided to work it a little with the cover flow and playing some games. I expected a run time of maybe 90 minutes, so almost three hours later when it finally gave up I was pleasantly surprised. I tried to keep the drive active, but mostly was only listening to tunes with the backlight on. I expect for phone usage, the battery life will be significantly shorter.
-I must at least comment on the packaging: is so nice to see something that comes in a simple cardboard box, protected by design and simple shapes instead of the hated hard plastic clamshell cases. This may seem an unusual point to make in a review, but I actually find myself directing my purchases away from those horridly wasteful plastic monstrosities whenever possible.
Considering a 4 GB flash drive can be had for under ten dollars, a wall/car charger about the same, and iPods come with a cable, I can't see this as a high priority purchase. The idea of having a flash drive slaved to an iPod has potential- though obscure- possibilities, maybe transferring artwork and music from a different location. I haven't thought of another so far, I will be sure to update this when I do. Battery life for the iPod was great, but as I mentioned earlier, it would take planning to have an emergency that it could resolve.
But for the gadget geek who must have it all, it is definitely a well made, as-advertised little device - it's no doubt a great stocking stuffer to be purchased by the unaware for the unappreciative.
Customer Review: Proving Something GOOD in a FLAWED Product: Rarely does this Happen
Summary: 3 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
The 3:1 item tries to do a lot for its owner, and the item works - to a point. It has the storage capacity that is well suited for many of my needs, does give me a boost in power, and does carry over as a data syncing device. The first part, the memory card option, is even good and has made me a happy camper because it has yet to let me down. It carries some odd formats that older drives won't allow (I REALLY get annoyed when I found out that I've dropped my dime on something that cannot carry a MP4, for instance), and it compresses data almost by itself and allows for this user to get the most from what he is carrying. The downside is possibly the data transfer - it is slow in that department - and the fact that ach time I have really needed the battery it was not there for me.
Even charged fully it died after 15-35 minutes but sitting - well, sitting made it useless really quickly and that made me angry because I need my IPOD to distract me when I am trying to clear my mind between teaching gigs.
Another thing people have not mentioned is the fact that the little beast is cumbersome and this complicates matters a little when it comes to conventional holders. I have two things I carry with me: There is a holster with six slots I am fond of because it allows me to keep my classes straight and there is also a keychain holder that allows me to easily carry one card with me when I am on the go. I have purchased 32 jumps as of now, all different just to try out new brands and sizes, and I had never considered the fact that one many not fit my storage. This became an issue with the 3:1 because the six holder BARELY (and by barely I mean I have to work it into something made of two things that fit almost everything - mesh and elastic) and because it WILL NOT fit on my keyring. This means I have to slide it into my pocket, hope that (1) I do not misplace it and (2) that I do not accidentally wash it and ruin something I have been working on for ages and this is a problem.
It REALLY limits what I am willing to use the device on.
As for the other matters - I want to like the thing and I have to say that I do like the item. Since I normally have my computer plugged in at work I do get 30 minutes and this helps me because the days are sometimes 16 hours or more (I am a student work on my PhD and a teacher helping undergrads with their statistical whateva so the IPOD runs a long, long time). That said, how much is 30 minutes when compared to other devices that offer more? This is not meant as a pitfall for everyone because some of my friends have also picked up this device and they find it useful because they only need extra charges for traveling home. So, just look at the time limits and how long the charge stays in the little beasties and ask yourself if it sounds good or not. Also ask yourself if the data transfer is important and how much importance it has: the device does a middle-of-the-road job with this and, if you only need that, you have a good thing. If, however, you need more then you might want to think about this. And, finally, there is the pro side in the fact that it is a 2gb jump that is of great quality.
So, ask yourself about the device, your needs, and if these comments hurt your selection of the device. If the answer is yea, then you may want to look somewhere else. One good thing to keep in mind is this: since they are trying this first, they would be a great company to keep in mind when they revise the item because they (1) tried and (2) were honest.
Seldom are companies either of these and I salute them for that. Honestly, I like the item enough to give it a 3.23 to a 3.5 when factoring in things like cost (too much - sadly), conception (good try - mcuh like the IPOD it servcices, it took a few tries to build the beast correctly), and trying to build something people could use.
I can say, with certainty, that the next generation of this item will have a buyer in me.
Customer Review: Ipod multifunction battery accessory - some concrete data review.
Summary: 3 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Ipod multifunction battery accessory - I run some tests.
As many have observed, the Macally PowerLink does what it claims to do. Its a battery extender, a computer sync cable eliminator, and a 2GB flash drive. But how well does it execute these functions?
As a battery extender I have tested it with a Ipod Touch 2G. I conditioned the PowerLink first by fully charging and discharging it 3 times. The instruction manual claims 270 mAh battery capacity. For the Touch it compares with about 850-1200 mAh built in battery capacity (as quoted by various sources, I never did see an official Apple spec). This would seem to imply at a minimum a 22% power extension (or about an hour and a half extra of video playback). For my test I used a YouTube streaming video movie with the Touch brightness set at about 50%, the WiFi was on. When the PowerLink is connected the battery symbol on the Ipod shows charging/external power. The PowerLink has 4 LED's for showing state of charge; connected/data transfer, quarter, half and full charge. I started the test by playing the movie and when the quarter charge led wen out, I checked the Ipod battery symbol, and indeed it now showed that it was now operating on its own battery. This occurred 49 minutes after the start of the test. In conclusion you can roughly get an extra 15% of video (49 minutes) or an extra 5 hours of music. The instruction book says that it is good for extending TALK time up to one hour. (The one hour is typed on a small sticker, peeling it off shows that it used to say 25 minutes underneath.) Considering the hassle of replacing the built in battery it may make sense to use the PowerLink whenever you first play videos, the music playing time extension hardly seems worth it.
As a sync cable eliminator: Well you have to use a short male to female USB plug extender cord (included) just to locate the PowerLink in a convenient spot. Since I hate to drag my official sync cable on the road, I do think I will use the PowerLink in the car where I can plug it into my cigarette USB power adapter, and use the Sync cable for charging the Touch and the PowerLink (have not tried this yet). I do wish the device would include the small lock pins to lock it into the Ipod (my 1G Nano sync cable had this, but the 2G Touch sync cable does not). It is way too easy to accidentally pull out the PowerLink from the Ipod.
Finally the 2GB flash drive test. This would be a fantastic feature if the Ipod could play a music or a video file from the PowerLink. No such luck, so we are only getting the convenience of a 2GB flash drive. How good is it? Well for comparison, I tried to transfer 2,000 files for a total of 1.81 GB. On a WinXP dual core system. The data transfer box predicted 60 minutes. Wow, the test was aborted. The PowerLink is formatted as a simple FAT file format. I went with a much less ambitious test, 29 files - 82.9 MB. Formatted as is, it took 92 seconds to transfer them to the PowerLink (95 seconds when reformatted as a FAT32 file system, so leave it as FAT). This is only .90MB/sec. For comparison I transferred the sane files to my PNY 4GB Optima Pro flash disk, it took only 13.4 seconds for a 6.19 MB/sec rate. By this test the PowerLink is a pretty slow flash disk.
In conclusion the PowerLink does a lot of things, but none of them exceptionally well. On the other hand I cant think of a different device that also does these things in such a small all-in-one package. So if you got to have a battery backup with some extra features this is the one to get.
Customer Review: Functional... design needs a bit of work
Summary: 4 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I am one of those people who carries around a miscellaneous collection of junk in my laptop bag. Anything that reduces the clutter is most welcome, and this little device performs three functions.
First note: this *does* work with the iPhone 3G. I don't see it explicitly listed on the box, or the Macally or Amazon websites, but that is what I used for testing.
Overall, it works as advertised and is a compact way to carry both an emergency battery pack and USB charger for your iPhone. As a bonus, it has a 2 GB USB drive built in as well.
To test the battery pack, I had to let my phone battery run down. When my phone posted the "20% battery" alert, I plugged the PowerLink into it and watched two 45-minute videos (stored locally on the phone and played through the internal speaker) and browsed YouTube for a bit before I got bored/tired and set my phone to charge normally for the night.
Note that this device ACTS AS AN EXTERNAL BATTERY PACK. It DOES NOT CHARGE your phone's internal battery. Consequently, it MUST REMAIN ATTACHED while the phone is drawing power from it. This can be cumbersome, but it is for emergency use, right?
The most common use case I can imagine is that the battery runs out completely and I either have to call a client back, or call home to say I will be late. So, in another test, I let my phone run until it turned itself off, plugged in the PowerLink, and tried to power up my phone. I had a confusing battery icon on the screen for a few (about 4) minutes before the phone was usable again. Sure enough, the PowerLink manual indicated that a phone with less than 10% battery may take several minutes to power on using the battery pack.
The Good
For starters, the USB drive is fine. In my not-so-scientific test, I transferred about a 1 GB to the device in a little under 13 minutes... 1.3 MB/sec or so. Not blazing, but adequate.
It comes with a USB extension cable (a little over 1' long) to plug into a machine that has ports which may not handle convenient attachment of both the PowerLink and the iPhone for charging -- it probably isn't a good idea to have the phone supported entirely by the PowerLink. More stuff to carry, but it is about the size of a pack of gum and it works.
The Bad:
It may seem minor, but the little plastic endcaps that cover the iPhone and USB connectors do not stay on very well. In the junk pocket in my laptop bag where this toy lives, I have found it without the caps once or twice. I think they should snap on a little better to prevent loss or damage to the connectors. That, or I should take care to isolate it from the rest of my junk.
Other:
The manual indicates that the 270mAh Lithium polymer battery will provide up to an hour of talk time. I don't talk that much, and anything over 15 minutes is fine for me. FWIW, the old versions of the manual indicated 25 minutes, but due to better power management with the latest releases of the iPhone OS, I guess they can squeeze out more talk time.