also to be crossposted as first entry to theammoboxi was really lucky at sxsw 2009 to have mobile evdo and a portable wifi hotspot in my backpack feeding all my wifi enabled devices enabling me to update to my social grid at all times what i was doing and when.
This little blog entry will show you some of the range of products on offer from tekkeon.
the advantage of this as a social talker, chatter and media maker is that it just ticks one of the major boxes that you need to tick as a mobile media maker - the biggest one. power. plug sockets at venues are like crack for geeks and you can generally see people needing to juice up regularly through the day. in fact - it can actually kill the creative process if one of the things you have to be worrying about when you need to power up. over the page i want to talk about a set of products from a company that i think has a lot of potential to become the defacto mobile power people in 2009.
I actually purchased my unit and had it delivered to an address in austin when i was over for the south by southwest festival and it worked out a lot cheaper to purchase stateside that purchasing in the uk, you can get them in the uk but not the whole range and expect to pay more for the units here.
The unit i had on test was a tekkeon mypower 3450i unit which came with a bunch of different connectors but not the usb socket which i had hoped for, that comes on the mp3700 unit - a flagship product. The tekkeon unit however powered my cradlepoint phs300 for well over a day a half and i could have probably gotta more time out of it if i was more "clock watching" regarding charging the batteries. As it was, i just turned the cradlepoint on and the tekkeon and allowed it to be always in charge mode.
What makes the tekkeon standout from any other product i have seen on the market is that they use polymer lithium batteries so they are extremely good at "holding" charge in hot or cold situations. Anybody who knows anything about batteries knows that they can lose their power or run down quickly when effected by the cold. I'm not sure what the situation is regarding heat. I have never had a mission in the sahara so cannot comment! :)
The mp3450i and mp3700 roughtly come in around the £125 mark and i really cannot speak highly enough of the product, i was blown away how it performed inside a hot bagpack all day long - in fact the thing that let it down was that the evdo card had to be rebooted 3/4 times during the day before the card unit got hot. It is advised to dangling that unit outside of your backpack so a bag with some external netting is often better.
After returning back to the uk i soon found out after that you can actually connect another battery module to the mp3450/mp3700 that will give you double the battery power and they sell a unit with a clip and adapter to connect to your existing unit. I think with careful usage you could stretch the usage to nearly a week, powering your cradlepoint and a lower power/power managment evdo card - they all you have to worry about is your usb devices being able to stay up for that time too. You can get the external/extended battery for about $99 - the myPower™ ALL Plus MP3450-10 Extended Battery
For keeping all your other devices (usb) charged up i would using the mp3700 as that actually has an autodetecting usb port and this retails again around the £100 to £125 mark. It's quite bulky thou and it might be a little out of the price range for some. If that is the case tekkeon also do another great product called the mp1800 for around the £30 mark in the uk that will give your iphone/ipod or similar usb powered/charged device a bit more juice in the field. I hope to be picking one of these up soon to help with my mobile iphone3g issues i have when using the phone for longer periods of time than usual. The mp1800 takes about 8 hrs to recharge from the mains so is useful to have on charge when you get back from a day of producing media to help your iphone get through the next day. If you can afford it thou i would recommend the mp3700 - spending the extra means you will get many charges off that one unit.
They also have a dedicated unit for the iphone called the myPower for iPhone for around $80 that uses the same polymer technology in a surround/wallet/sleeve that is said to double your iphone battery life. In real life heavy duty operation this probably means that your iphone3g might just make it through the day! :)
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