Powerfreakz Evolution 3000 Portable Solar Charger Review

Theres not a set way to test a product such as this so its a simple affair of using it for a period of time and seeing how it goes. Prior to this review going live, we flew out Taiwan for Computex 2012 and after that I went camping for a weekend, so these were ideal opportunities to see how it fairs both on the go and in the middle of a field.

When out and about on the go, the charger easily slipped into my pocket alongside my phone without any difficulty, the slim and light design was just like having two phones next to each other instead of one. The oly part that stuck out was the cable that connected the two, but the retractable design kept everything neat and tidy. I’ve got a terrible habit of forgetting to put my phone on charge at the end of the day and typically I’d get caught out the following day when at the shows, but this came as a life saver on one of two occasions.

Out in the field, quite literally, I’m cut off from mains power for a number of days and having to walk to the car park to stick my phone in the car for an hour or so is a real inconvenience and not really practical.  Here I found that the unit as expected did take longer to charge than when connected to the mains, but leaving it out all day isn’t exactly the hardest task to undertake and for the first time in a long time, I was able to keep my phone on all weekend with out constantly looking to see when I needed to pop to the car. Here I also managed to gauge how much light had to be around for the unit to charge. Thankfully we did get a whole range of conditions (its as though the weather knew I wanted to test it) and the bright sunlight swiftly charged the unit from empty to full in a couple of hours. When the sun went in, it was only when evening really started to set in that the charging light went out and I had to wait for the following day.

One question I did think to myself, is how far can this unit stretch its battery life i.e. how much can it charge my phone? After all its all and well up to this point but if I can only get a 20% charge off of it then is it really worth it? To my surprise, I managed to get two full charges and a part charge of an iPad off of the Evolution 3000 before it went flat. I know the box claims upto 4 charges, but this is relative to the device being charged. Lesser spec (non-smart) phones for example may be able to get more charges out of the battery pack, but the likes of modern smart phones themselves have larger batteries so this has to be taken into consideration. Either way, this is an impressive result.