Posts Tagged solar gear

This funky little Solio Bolt looks cool and and the price is right, but it delivers underwhelming performance on its main purpose: solar power gadget charging.

Contractors and carpenters are fond of asking customers, “Do you want it fast, cheap, or good? Pick two.” With portable solar chargers, there are only two choices. “Do you want it tiny or do you want it to really work?”

With a few very rare exceptions, a solar charger that’s small enough to fit in your pocket—tiny—is not going to be very good. I’m afraid this Solio Bolt one is not one of the exceptions. It’s tiny alright, but is hard to take seriously as a solar device.

I’ve had less than impressive results with other Solio chargers in the past and have always wondered why they’re so popular. My guess is that the intriguing design quickly gets the attention of photo-centric magazine editors and TV show hosts, so each new release always gets lots of publicity. But based on my tests it seems like the designers are getting the bulk of the budget, with little left for maximizing the small solar panels to really capture and store some energy.

First the design, which is quite fetching. This Solio model is a bit smaller than a sandwich with the crusts cut off (or a bit larger than a pack of cigarettes), so it’s easy to pack. It’s got two panels that stay together when not in use, but swivel apart to become two sun-catching panels when open. The odd shape with the rounded back makes it kind of hard to prop up on anything, so there’s a hole in the middle where you stick a pencil through and then you can face it toward the sun. Hey, they even include a pencil with it!

It follows the minimalist trend of just having one button. That would be fine if all you had to do was turn it on and off. But they advise you to hold the button down to switch from regular mode to Apple mode, something my other chargers haven’t required but it could be handy for iPods like my wife’s that give an annoying error message when plugged up to anything besides a computer USB port. You hold down the button again to switch back and the LED light color changes to tell you which mode you’re in (red or blue). Then the LED flashes are supposed to be your status indicators. When they blink five times you’re fully charged. They blink twice you’re running out.

Then there’s a constant blink while your unit is charging, which is where this unit performed the best: it charged up the iPod Touch in less than an hour, a smart phone in about an hour and a half. One big fault with the output though is that there’s no cut-off built in. So once your device is charged, the Solio unit keeps cranking out power until it runs out of juice. So unless you keep checking on your device to see when it’s done, you’ll never get more than one charge out of it.

In my tests though, that wasn’t much of an issue since I never got much more than a charge out of it anyway, from a Kindle to a Touch to a Motorola Atrix Android phone. And that was after it taking an average of 12 hours to fully charge under the blue-sky Florida sun. I never managed to get it fully charged in just one day, even a full day with no clouds and me moving it every few hours to directly face the sun. If you’re in a cloudy area, it could take you days to charge back up.

So in the end, this is more of a cool-looking solar toy priced to move than a useful solar charger that can be your go-to device on the road. Sure, you can always recharge it with the USB cord instead (which still takes an inexplicable 4 to 5 hours), but if you’re going to use fossil fuels instead of solar energy, you might as well carry something smaller and more robust, like the Innergie PocketCell I reviewed recently. It works faster and is half the size. If you just look at specs this Solio Bolt has a 2000mAh capacity and 1000 mAh output, which is equal to the Brunton Restore charger I reviewed two years ago. But that one charges up twice as fast and routinely is able to charge multiple devices before running out. So while this Bolt is smaller and cheaper than many rivals, I’d advise paying for something more robust, with larger panels, unless you’re going to be traveling in very sunny places and staying put in one location for enough time for this to charge.

The Solio Bolt lists for $70 and is available for a tad less at Amazon or REI.

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