Wireless iPod Speaker from Cy Fi

Whenever I hear the words “wireless” and “speaker” together, two bad visions come to mind. One is the set of Advent wireless stereo speakers in my daughter’s playroom: if you even look at them funny, they lose the signal and sound like crap. The other vision is a party I was at a few years ago where the host spent half the night moving around a set of those all-weather wireless speakers like you see in the Skymall catalog because the sound kept cutting out or getting distorted.

Fortunately this cy*fi speaker is a different story: it promises “CD-quality” sound while broadcasting tunes from your iPod and my skepticism was dashed as soon as I fired it up. When I compared the sound on this nifty 4-ounce device to a couple heavier ones that plug in, the cy*fi actually sounded better, even when the transmitter was on the other side of the room or I was moving around the room with my iPod.

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Sansa Slot Radio Pre-programmed MP3 Player

The Sansa slotRadio is a strange concept, but it works brilliantly in practice. It’s a pre-loaded MP3 player with 1,000 songs, plus a radio, all in a tiny clip-on package. Put a new chip in the slot, you’ve got 1,000 new songs instantly.

I love my iPod Classic, especially when I’m on a long flight or I need to keep my daughter entertained while traveling. The thing is, as user-friendly as the whole interface is, I’m really lazy about loading it up with new music, despite the fact I’ve got a thousand CDs sitting one room away from the computer…and I have an eMusic subscription…and I review new world music albums every couple months for Perceptive Travel. But unlike a teenager with all the time in the world, I always seem to have something else higher on the to-do list.

So I was intrigued by the idea of this Sansa slotRadio player as a time saver and I’ve enjoyed it far more than I expected. First there’s the level of surprise, which is ever better than it is with the iPod Shuffle because you really don’t know what’s coming next. You didn’t load it up to start with. Plus you can see the artist and song name on the display—my main beef with the Shuffle. It’s almost as small as the 2nd generation Shuffle though, and has a clip on the back, plus it has a radio for listening to NPR or local music in a foreign country. Not a bad value for a hundred bucks including the first 1,000 song sampler.

...continued on the new Practical Travel Gear blog

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Keen Recycled Materials Harvest Grand Bag

Now that the Earth Day media (and blogger) bandwagon is done for a year, you will see the predictable drop-off in stories about green travel and eco-friendly gear. The world keeps turning and deteriorating though, so we'll keep talking about what does and doesn't help the planet when you are on the move.

I've been trying out one of these cool recycled materials bags from the Keen Harvest collection. The "harvest" name refers to what these totes are made out of: recycled rice paper and "brown haul bag paper." This one is the Harvest Grand, a simple shoulder tote that's like a narrow messenger bag. Inside the flap there's a zippered front pocket, a small interior zippered pocket, a place for a phone/notebook and some pens, and the main compartment.

Continue...

Cute Portable Digital Picture Frame From Royal

Bring your favorite pictures along for ten bucks or less!

Over the years, as a traveling dad, I have found it extremely useful to pack plenty of diversions for the kid or kids tagging along. I haven't sprung for a Sony PSP or a Nintendo DS because I know how addictive they can be even for adults. But I share my iPod classic with my daughter so she can watch cartoons and listen to her favorite tunes. And often I'll pick up a cheap gadget to bring on a trip, something that has the flash of the new.

This little 1.4-inch digital picture frame from Royal is a toy in terms of specs, but at a retail price of $7 to $10, it's a great value. My daughter loves it and she can't wait to hook it onto her backpack the next time we take off, bringing photos of all her friends and grandparents along for the ride.

Set-up was dead easy. There's a mini CD that installs the program on your computer. Then you plug in the device, select the photos you want, and sync it up. The photo frame gets the time and date from your computer and charges up via the USB cord. Your photo library is presented in the software in the normal folder system. When you select a photo the software puts a cropping box over it (which you can move around) to size it for this device. In other words, you get the faces, not a shrunken version of the entire photo.

The picture quality is not going to win any awards, but it's pretty good for the price. You can scroll through the pictures manually, or just sit back and let it go in slideshow mode. After a period of inactivity it shuts off by itself. Thankfully Royal resisted the urge to add a bunch of useless features to it, but there is an alarm clock, so I guess this qualifies as a double-duty item for packing light. The clip also doubles as a stand.

There aren't a lot of good travel gadgets that will cost you an Alexander Hamilton or less. This is one that delivers.

Get the Royal PF140 Digital Photo Frame at Overstock.com

Get it at Amazon

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A Bracelet That Could Save Your Life

Imagine you could wear something around your wrist that could save your life. Imagine that instead of some woven backpacker bracelet you won in a backgammon game in Dahab or that you bought in Panajachel for 25 cents, you wear a bracelet woven from 18 feet of super-strong parachute cord. How cool is that?

OK, so you've got to spend $19 on it unless you have the time and concentration to weave one yourself, but if it gets you out of a jam, that's a pretty cheap insurance policy. Plus it makes a cool conversation piece. That's the idea behind the paracord survival bracelets from SurvivalStraps.com.

Normally this is where I tell you how the gear item worked in practice, but thankfully I haven't needed to rappel down a cliff or spend the night tied to a couple of tree branches. So here's the rundown from the company:

In an emergency situation, you can unravel the bracelet and deploy the paracord for use. If you do use your Survival Bracelet, simply send what is left back to us, along with your story, and we will make you a new one, free of charge (shipping charges will apply).

Whether you are in the woods, stranded on an island, at the range, or running errands around town, you will always have several feet of 550 lb. test paracord with you at all times. Oh yeah, we also think they look pretty great! And since they come in almost 900 different color combinations, you shouldn't have a problem finding something you like! (Check out the colors tab to view our standard color choices.) They come with either a tough plastic side release buckle or a marine grade stainless steel shackle for attachment purposes.

So if you actually have to use it for its intended purpose, they will send you a new one. How many time do you see a guarantee like that? The company also makes belts, lanyards, watch straps, and more. See the whole line at SurvivalStraps.com.

Your Own Pics on Postcards from Hazel Mail

How many times have you rummaged through the postcard rack in some tourist town and thought, "My own pictures are better than these." And have you dropped into the post office in say, Cusco, and been flabbergasted at how much it costs to send off those postcards you just bought?

I've been testing out a pretty cool solution from Hazel Mail that brings postcard mailing into the digital age. Here's how it works: first, you log into their site and upload your photo. Hi-res ones straight from the camera are fine. Then you format the image, with the ability to stretch it, crop it, or put a border around it. Then you enter your message and the address, picking out a font that you like. You pay $1.50 per card to addresses in the U.S., $2 for those in Europe, varying rates elsewhere.



Then you go about your travels, knowing that even if your e-mails get filtered and nobody really looks at all those pics you painstakingly uploaded to your Facebook page, your friends and relatives will know you are thinking about them. After all, a piece of mail stands out far more these days than another few megabytes in the digital firehose we're all drinking from.

There are a few little quirks. The website is very coy about giving out any info when you visit. You actually have to go through the whole uploading process to find out anything about fees and payment methods. Then they send a confirmation after the order, which is nice, but in mine the graphics covered up all the text so it just looked like an ad in HTML mode. I assume they'll work out the glitches soon though and add more info for prospective users up front in time. Apart from that, the site is dead easy to use and once you've registered it's easy to send new cards in the future. It'll store the address of Mom and Sis, for instance, so you don't have to retype them later. You can even upload a whole bunch of addresses from a contact list or spreadsheet.

I sent one of the Mexico City postcards to my own house to test the outcome and the result was nice. The photo looked almost as good as what you would get from a photo processing place and it had a real canceled stamp on it. The printed message doesn't have quite the same charm as a scribbled note with road dirt and spilled coffee on it, but still more personal than an e-mail. All this and you can avoid paying rapacious international postage costs.

Several writers have wondered if the sending of postcards is a dying art, but Hazel Mail seems like a good compromise in keeping this more personal communication method alive. Highly recommended.

Design Awards for Gear that Works

I almost fell off my chair when I looked at Travel + Leisure's 2009 Design Awards in their March issue. They managed to slide in a few expensive items from potential advertisers as "honorable mentions," but amazingly the most expensive gear item winner was a $225 bag and two items were under a hundred bucks.

The bag was in the "best luggage" category and indeed it does look pretty cool. It's the Hydro Sports Water-resistant T-Tech Backpack from Tumi.

Best Travel Accessory was this pair of Melissa Shoes pictured here. They pack easily, look interesting, and are 100% recyclable. At $79 retail, they seem pretty practical to me.

Amazingly, a $30 coat made the cut, and from Wal-mart no less. It's the Norma Kamali Trench Coat and I have to say it looked better in the magazine than many others costing 10 or 20 times as much.

The last two items I have reviewed and used myself. The Flip Video Camera got the nod, though I reviewed the older version, not the Mino. For $180 retail, it's a dead simple way to shoot video and it stores an hour's worth of footage.

The other item I've raved about for years and I would argue it's probably the greatest invention to come along in a decade for travelers: the Steripen water purifier. It's small, it's effective, and it helps save the planet. Obviously, it's well-designed enough to get the notice of these critics as well.

Good stuff! You can see more in a slideshow here.


Get the SteriPEN Adventurer Ultraviolet Water Purifier

Portable Room Safe for Travelers

With the Travelsafe100 from Pacsafe, you can forget about maids with sticky fingers.

When I was in a big foreign city recently on a travel writing assignment, two women sitting beside me in the lobby of a Sheraton hotel were filling out a police report. They had put some things in their safe but forgot to lock it before leaving the room. When they came back from dinner, their money and jewelry were gone. I've usually managed to hold onto my valuables when traveling, but when I stayed at a very nice Hyatt on assignment in a different country, my wife's watch got stolen from the bathroom counter. Once while sleeping in a hostel in Singapore, another backpacker stole my camera during the night.

In general I think electronic safes in hotels are pretty reliable, but if you forget your code someone can always open it, right? So that means at least some employees really can get in it if they want to badly enough. Plus in many cheaper hotels, you either need to leave things up front in a shared safe or take your chances unless a locker is supplied.

This portable safe from Pacsafe will keep your valuables safe in any hotel or hostel and will also serve as a secondary stash while on the move. It's basically a pouch with slash-proof steel mesh, a locking cinch cable at the top, and a padlock with a key. You just secure it to any fixed or hard-to-move item like a pole or large piece of furniture. Then it would take a pair of bolt-cutters to get at your things. So you could also use this to secure items on a bus or train while you are trying to snooze, resting easier than you would if your camera and iPod were just zipped up in your daypack. (Unless you have a daypack from the same company that is.)

I've tried out a lot of different items from Pacsafe and have been impressed with their strength and durability. They keep the practicality in mind too though: this portable safe can be rolled up and held that way by an included piec of elastic or a rubber band if you lose that. So it's not all that hard to make space for it in your pack or suitcase. (There's a video demo at this link that shows you how it works.)

The Travelsafe100 lists for $45, but you can get it for a shade less at these retailers:

Pacsafe TravelSafe 100 at Backcountry.com


TravelSafe 100 at Buy.com


Get it at REI

A Jacket That Packs Some Heat

Baby it's cold outside! Bundling up in lots of layers is fine, but not so great when you need to move around a lot, say snowboarding or skiing. Each layer adds more bulk and less flexibility.

How about packing some heat?

I've been trying out a sample of a vest from Ardica Technologies that is definitely unique. The Ardica Moshi System provides your own private heater for up to 8 hours on the low setting, or three hours on high. Basically it's a thin battery-powered heater that goes in a flap resting against your back, between the shoulder blades. You recharge it before you go and then control it through a lighted insigna on your chest, Star Trek style. In my tests the heater made a major difference, keeping me toasty on long walks in sub-freezing weather. It's light enough and thin enough that it wasn't a nuisance either.

But wait, there's more! The system also has a USB plug that allows you to charge up your iPod while you are on the move. Unfortunately that plug is situated in a side pocket rather than the one close to your ears where there is a slot to put your earphones through. So you either listen or charge, but not both. However, you can also use it to charge your cell phone or anything that has either a USB plug or an adapter with one. Other commercial jackets on the way will probably have multiple linked batteries and charging ports situated differently.

This is no thrown-together piece of technology. You can thank the U.S. government for laying out the millions in research grant dollars it took to develop it all. You see, soldiers don't like to be cold either.

The only problem is, the marketing has gotten ahead of the actual availability. You can't buy it from the Ardica website, so apparently I'm special to have gotten this loaner. Mountain Hardwear is going to put out a jacket equipped to use the Ardica heating system, but not until the fall of '09. Assume this will add a chunk of change to the price of a jacket as well, anywhere from $150 to $200. (Yet as it stands now, there's only a one year warranty.) But hey, my wife would have gladly paid that last time we spent a long weekend skiing in the blustery cold.

Stay tuned...

Comfy TravelRest Travel Pillow

I always carried an inflatable travel pillow with me when I was backpacking around the world and there are times I still use one on a stingy airline with no pillows. There are basic flaws in the two main types though: the basic pillow-shaped ones and the C-shaped ones that go around your neck. Neither is all that flexible in terms of how you can use it and where it will fit when you're in a cramped coach seat.

I've been testing this new TravelRest inflatable pillow from HiGear Design and as is often the case, a slight change in outlook has made a huge difference. By reimagining the shape and design of a travel pillow, this company has turned out something that looks strange but works really well.

Deflated, it rolls up into a small and light package about the size of a pair of tube socks. A snap keeps it from unraveling. You can even snap it to the outside of your carry-on bag for easy removal on the plane.

Once you're ready to use it, a few puffs into the valve gets it ready. What you're holding looks like an oversized quotation mark, one that can be used in several ways. The attached cinch line allows the TravelRest pillow to attach to the back of your seat and stay in place when your head starts lolling around. You can snap the bottom of it to your seatbelt to keep it more secure. If you're stuck in the airport, you can just sling it over your shoulder, hug it like a Teddy bear, and snooze for a while during your delay. (Don't be surprised if you start dreaming of your childhood bedroom...)

This pillow is also handy in the car. It can attach to the headrest and seatbelt for a nice nap during a long car ride---especially good for kids who have to be stuck in a car seat for hours on end. It's easy to wash after someone drools on it too.

The TravelRest pillow lists for $27 and you can buy it direct from their site or in some luggage stores.

Nap26 Wants to Help You Power Nap

A lot of the things I review on this travel gear blog I'm very enthusiastic about and I use them in my travels. Sometimes I try out an item that's a total bust and I don't mention it. The Nap26 sleep inducer CD falls somewhere in between.

The idea is that you listen to this audio recording with headphones or earplugs and a little later you wake up refreshed: "Feel like you slept 3 hours after 26 minutes."

If that sounds to you like the kind of outrageous claim you'd hear on an infomercial, I'm with you. But I do highly value a good afternoon nap now and then (especially when I can swing in a hammock in Mexico). The claim that the almost inaudible pulses in this sync up with your brain waves probably has some grounding in good scientific principles. So I gave it a shot on three different lazy afternoons.

The verdict? For me anyway, a 33% success rate. And for that time, I fell asleep halfway through it, which means I only got a 13 minute nap. Good enough for Thomas Edison maybe, but not for me.

The success of the Nap26 probably depends on how well you sleep normally. My significant other has all kinds of sleep problems and wears earplugs and a mask at night. But then put her in front of a TV and pop in a movie---out like a light. She's going to try this out soon and will probably have better success than me. I normally don't need any help dropping off to sleep and the white noise in this distracted me more than it helped me.

The Nap26 website is full of testimonials from happy customers though, from all walks of life, and there's a money back guarantee if you don't see results. So if you could use more plane naps when you travel, for 20 bucks it's worth a shot.

You can download the CD to iTunes or as a MP3, but be advised it's not as simple as that. You have to tweak the settings so it is downloaded in full data-hogging mode, not as a compressed file.

Get it at the PowrNaps store.

Get it at Amazon.

Backgammon in a Bag for Travel

One of the joys of travel is that you finally get some real down time, time to kick back, read a book, or spend a lazy afternoon with a few beers and backgammon.

It's hard to lug a whole backgammon board with you though and while I've carried a small magnetic travel one with me on several occasions, the experience is just not the same. I've been trying out a great new solution called Bag Gammon. It's a bag with a cinch cord that inside has regular-sized pieces, two sets of dice, a doubling cube, and a fold-out full-sized board. It's not super-light because of the heft of the regular pieces, but you can cram it into a corner of your pack or suitcase no problem. (See the video on the website to see how it all works.)

You can use this on any flat surface, so it'll work at a beach bar or on a hotel bed. You get the same click-clack of stacking your checkers on the side as you bring them all home as you would with a regulation board and you don't have to pass the dice back and forth.

For now you need to buy your travel backgammon set from the baggames.com site, where you can also get checkers and chess. The backgammon one is $14.95 plus shipping---not bad. I'll definitely be taking this along on all my future vacations.

Jimi Plastic Wallet

I'm on vacation right now, but am popping in with a review of the Jimi plastic wallet I'm carrying around. It has a slot for credit cards and a money clip, which is about all I need besides my passport.

Why a plastic wallet? Well, paradoxically it can be good for the environment, but I like it for practical reasons. My money stays dry at the pool or on a boat---or in the rain. It pops into a zippered pocket easily on my shorts. And I don't care if it gets scratched up or something. If you want, you can even hang it around your neck on a lanyard, wearing it under your clothing.

The Jimi wallet comes in a variety of colors, is durable, is water resistant, and is made in the USA even, from 100 percent recycled materials. Get your own for $15.

A Pen for Your Wallet

Put your money where your pen is!

How many times have you seen someone talking on a cell phone start looking around frantically for a pen? Wouldn't it be nice to have a pen on you every time you're carrying your wallet---without having to remember it?

That's the idea behind The Wallet Pen, a nice little writing device that clips into the folded part of your wallet. It's thin enough to squeeze in there without making the wallet any thicker, but it's larger and easier to write with than the tiny pens in the Pico Pen device I reviewed a while back. I've been carrying it around for a week and only notice it's there when I need it or when I open my wallet and see a silver glint coming from the fold.

This is not some cheap throwaway item though. It retails for $49 and comes in a nice gift box with a ribbon, a spare ink refill enclosed as well. It comes in two sterling silver models, made in Vermont and not in some Chinese factory. It's an item you'll want to use and keep using for years---or give to someone who will think it's the coolest and most thoughtful present ever.

You can order the Wallet Pen direct from the manufacturer, or here's a list of stores that carry the pen both in the real and virtual worlds.

MP3 Car Transmitter in a Cup Holder from Maxell

I love the simple innovations that solve a problem well, at a reasonable price, by figuring out what we really need. This cool device from Maxell blasts the tunes from your iPod or other MP3 player through your radio, on a frequency of your choosing, and remembers up to 10 of those frequencies for later. All well and good, but it plugs into your car socket and then fits in your cup holder! So there it is, in a handy spot, right near your radio.

If you are using an iPod, this Maxell FM transmitter performs double duty by charging up your music player at the same time. So you leave the car with more juice in your player than you had to start with--and you didn't pay the electric company for the power. (Yes, I know, your engine powered it, but you were driving somewhere with that gas anyway, right?)

Maybe I'm so overjoyed because this innovation arrived on my doorstep just as my car CD player started picking and choosing which discs it wanted to play, with no discernable pattern to which ones would be rejected or when it would decide to not play any of them. Like a guy who gets in a fight with his girlfriend and then that night picks up the hottest babe in the club, I can smugly ignore my CD player's moodiness now and wait for it to admit it's wrong. Maybe we'll never get together again--who knows.

Sure, everything has its drawbacks, and in time I'll see the bad side of my new date. For now, the one principle flaw seems to be the printed warning to "store unit at temperatures less than 60 degrees F." Say what? Unless I make a drive up to the Arctic Circle sometime soon, I can't imagine any scenario where my car is going to spend a summer day under 60 degrees. So either this little cutie is going to wilt on a hot day or I'm going to have to take her with me everywhere I go...

She's also playing a bit hard to get. If you want to find one for yourself, search around the web for model P34 or Maxell 191234 transmitter.

Tati Yes Watch Keeps You in Sync as You Travel

I have only been home three days in the past month, so I have been trying out the abilities of this TATI version of the Yes Watch as I moved through different latitudes and time zones.

The Yes Watch company marries the wonders of computer chips with the solar and moon cycles we've seen above us since the dawn of man. The new with the old, the unseen with the obvious. Their whole line of watches visually displays the daylight time and the moon cycle time, wherever you happen to be. You click through an alphabetical menu (using two of the four buttons) and pick your home city and away city out of 500+ cities around the world. Then you see when the sun will rise and when it will set, plus the time you will see the moon and what it will look like.

More on that later, but first a bit on this specific model, the "tati." I have the wrists of a musician rather than the wrists of a construction manager or a fat executive, so those huge Swiss chronographs you see splashed all over GQ and Best Life aren't going to look very good on me most of the time. This watch is mounted on a leather strap, so you can tighten it to fit and it doesn't look like you're trying to say, "Hey everybody, look at my watch!" It's attractive in a more subtle way but still has some heft and the feel of fine workmanship. (It even comes in a pretty velvet box.) It's small enough to be unisex, with five strap color choices that switch out easily.

I found myself looking at the sunrise and sunset displays on this watch frequently as I moved through Portland, Seattle, British Columbia, Alberta, and then the east coast of the U.S. Not only was the novelty of it interesting (as in sunset at close to 10 p.m. and sunrise before 5 a.m. in parts of Canada), but it helped me as a parent figure out when I could hope to get my kid in bed and whether we needed to draw the hotel blackout curtains. The moonscape part was interesting too, seeing the cycles and noticing when the moon would be visible during daylight hours.

As with any watch with multiple functions, you need to keep the instruction manual handy. After a while I got the hang of changing cities easily as I moved around the hemisphere and after a while I could light up the display in the dark without hitting the wrong button. I had to look up how to set the alarm each time though. It's not all that loud--better as a backup if you're a heavy sleeper--but there is a snooze function. If you're so inclined, you can also take advantage of any of these functions: 24-hour stopwatch with laptime, a 99 minute timer with alarm, a past and future date time calculator and a 999 day countdown/up.

The tati watch from Yes lists for $395-$445 is programmed through 2099, so unless you were born yesterday it should last a lifetime.

Shake Light Flashlight - No Batteries!

A couple years back I ran a review of a shake flashlight (torch) that never needs batteries. I bought that one for less than 10 bucks on eBay though and got what I paid for. After about a year the switch started wigging out on me and I had to hold my thumb on it to keep the light on. (Still makes a good kid toy though.) Now I'm using something more rugged and dependable: the Shakelight from Gaiam.

This one runs $20 to $30 depending on the exact model and where you buy it, but it could be the last flashlight you ever need. Plus you don't ever have to buy batteries for it. If a twister comes through or a meteor wipes out the electric grid, you'll still have light for weeks with just a shake of the arm. Naturally this makes it a good bet for traveling in developing countries too since the electricity supply is often dicey and the acid batteries go straight into the ground or into a burning pile of garbage. This you just shake and the magnetic coil system does its thing.

The Gaiam Shakelight weighs less than a pound, but has a double coil that enables almost a half hour of light after just two minutes of shaking. It's nine inches long and thin except for where the light comes out, so it's not much trouble to pack. It's the little things that often have the most impact on the environment over time. Using an eco-friendly flashlight is one little thing that's painless and productive.

(Just one warning on the box though: avoid this if you've got implanted medical devices and you might want to keep it away from any magnetic computer disks or credit cards.)

Get this version from Amazon for $20.

Search for more eco-friendly gear from Gaiam.com

Review of the HYmini Wind-powered Charger

A lot of these travel gear reviews are variations on a theme, slight improvements on a standard item. The HYmini charger is a different story. This thing is a real breakthrough.

If you've been whining about how our various governments don't do enough to promote solar power and wind power, here's your chance to put your money where your mouth is. (And not a whole lot of money at that.) This innovative item is a personal charger powered up by wind. If you get the attachments you can even clip it onto your bike when you go out cycling or to your arm when you're out running. It only takes a breeze of 9 miles per hour to keep it humming.

After 20 to 40 minutes, you've got enough juice to charge up your iPod, your mobile phone, or any gadget with a USB or USB mini input. If you're in a place with unreliable wind but plenty of sun, you can supplement with the optional solar panel. To add to the eco-cred, the solar panel is housed in cardboard and the packaging it all comes in uses mostly renewable materials--no plastic clamshells from hell.

All nice in theory, but how well does it work? Extremely well, I'm happy to report. I simply stuck the thing in my office window on a nice spring day and then fully charged up my iPod. I put it back in the window again for an hour, went back to my work, and it was ready to go again. On my bike handlebars the turbine was charging up the whole time I was pedaling. Granted, the HYmini will not keep your Treo fully changed all day and night all week, but it's a nice supplement when you are between outlets or when you just need to get a near-dead phone going for another few conversations.

The only drawback is one created by the least environmentally friendly companies around: the cellphone manufacturers. As with the Chargepod I reviewed earlier, the HYmini comes with five attachments, but that only covers a fraction of the annoyingly unstandardized handsets out there. The Nokia adapter didn't work on my wife's Nokia and since I have a Sanyo phone I'm S.O.L. As best as I can tell, they don't sell any additional adapters on their site beyond LG2 and Samsung2. (Like Nokia, these guys can't even make their OWN phones work with the same chargers.) Someday the electronics industry will wake up and realize they need to become part of the solution instead of making us buy new accessories every time we get a new gadget, but they haven't gotten the memo yet.

The charger comes in black, white, or green, along with a wall plug, five connectors, and a USB cord for $50. The solar panel is another 25 bucks, the armband $15, and the bike handlebars connector is $9. So if you went for the whole shebang it would be about $100 plus shipping. Hey, there are probably cheaper ways to save the world, but how many of them can charge up your gadgets in the Sahara or Seattle? Not many retailers seem to be stocking this yet, online or physical, so order direct from HYmini.

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Carry-on Cosmetic Solution: Travelon Travel Sheets

The number of solutions out there to deal with carry-on luggage restrictions for airlines is getting better all the time and I've got a few in the hopper to review in the coming month. (Already done, the 3-1-1 Travel Bag.) Lots of points for originality though with these travel sheets from Travelon. Liquid? We don't need no stinkin' liquid!

These are little sheets that come out of a dispenser and then when you add water, they lather up to fill a cosmetic need of your choice. Do your sink laundry. Shave. Shampoo your hair. All without worrying about how many ounces your bottles hold because there aren't any ounces of anything.

Yeah, it sounds a little wacky, but they work surprisingly well. The shampoo takes a little forethought since your fingers need to be dry when you take out the sheets---otherwise you could ruin the whole pack. Add water and lather up though and it works like regular shampoo. The shaving cream worked even better, giving me a better shave than I get from conventional shaving cream and definitely better than what I get from the dollar store travel razor I've used before.

I wish these sink laundry sheets had been around when I was a long-term backpacker. Besides the airline advantages, these are a lot easier and lighter to carry around than packets of powdered detergent or a bottle of liquid. You get 50 sheets in a pack for around $7.

In summary, they're compact, light, relatively cheap, and a breeze to take through airports. Apart from the initial wierdness factor, there is little to fault with these travel sheets. Go get some at your favorite gear or luggage store or at Amazon. For more info, see the Travelon site.

Whoomp! There it is

Sorry, couldn't resist the song reference for this device since it helps your mobile music sound better. I'm talking about the Whoomp! earbud enhancers. (They insist on putting an explanation mark in the trademarked name, to the sure consternation of picky editors everywhere.)

If you're one of the few people that didn't already have an MP3 player of some sort and you got one under the tree or in your stocking, you've probably already noticed that the earphones they came with aren't so hot. Sure, they'll do since you're probably not willing to pay a hundred dollars or more for really good ones, but they seldom deliver auditory bliss. Blame it on cheap manufacturing, a bad ear cavity fit, or bass leakage, but the sound is generally just so-so.

These Whoomp earbud enhancers are a novel solution. They fit over the earphones that came with your player and dramatically enhance the sound by extending it into a soft foam bud that goes further into your ear canal. I know, this is a recipe for future hearing problems if you're the kind who cranks it up to 11 and we can hear you across the room. For those who keep things below the ear-splitting level though, these enhancers make your normal little earbuds sound fantastic. The bass really thumps, the vocals are really rich, and you can hear the whole mix clearly. When I listened to one track before and after style, there were sounds coming through the Whoomp enhancers that weren't even there with the iPod earbuds alone.

You have to judge whether that enhancement itself is worth $19.95 because if someone just dropped these two little bits of plastic and foam in your hand, you'd probably say, "20 bucks for this?!?" Maybe the price will come down once they're in every Best Buy or Target. For now they're kind of hard to find, though you can get the Whoomp earbud enhancers at Amazon (via a third party).

The verdict though is that these things allow your music to reach its full potential. They make your compressed MP3s played through crappy earbuds sound like CD tracks played through real headphones. Nice.

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