Review: Scoshe SolBat II

Here are my results for charging devices using  the Scoshe SolBat II. The SolBat II supplies power for  approximately two hours while charging your device and is not supplemented by external sources of power (USB/Solar). Just make sure you don’t put it through too many charge/discharge cycles in the span of a few hours. I actually overheated my device during charge/discharge tests for this review and had to get it exchanged for a new one! Thankfully it didn’t catch fire or go all melty like chocolate fondue on me or this review would never be finished! All my tests have the Scoshe SolBat II with a full charge and are not supplemented with external energy sources unless otherwise stated.

Samsung Galaxy S Captivate

Test #1 — Phone Off: I had previously drained my phone’s battery to 10% during the day and I used the SolBat II to charge it while the phone was off. The SolBat II charged my phone for approximately two hours and ten minutes (2:10)

Test #2 — Phone On: I tested how much of a charge it would give me while my phone was on. Note that this was the test that overheated and essentially broke the SolBat II. I had partially charged the SolBat II to about half full before heading out and had put it on my dashboard with the solar panel facing up. I had the GPS on with the Navigation app on my phone running and the screen turned to max brightness and it did slowly charge the phone. It lasted about 35-45 minutes before it went kaput. After that test, both my phone and the SolBat II were very warm. It would be a good idea to watch how warm your Scoshe SolBat II gets so you don’t kill it with heat damage like I did.

3DS

Test #1 — Sleep Mode: It charged the 3DS for just over 2 hours and gave me roughly just under half of its battery life back, which isn’t too shabby if you’re on a longer drive or on a cross-continental flight.

Test #2 — 3DS Off: It gave me a boost of just over half of my 3DS’s battery life after about 2.25 (2:15) hours of charging, so it’s a good boost if you’re on the go and need to top off the battery on your system and don’t have access to a plug.

DS Lite

Test #1: The Scoshe SolBat II lasted about two and a half hours (2:35) before being totally depleted while charging the DS Lite. Based on the extra hour I needed to  fully charge the system, the SolBat II charged the DS Lite battery from totally dead to approximately 65% full.

For recharging your Scoshe SolBat II, I could verify that recharging it does take approximately 2.5 hours, which the box says it would. Unfortunately I couldn’t fully test out the 18 hours charge time to charge it on solar since the weather here doesn’t really like to stay a certain way for very long and light conditions change too quickly.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.brokenfuse.com/2011/05/19/review-scoshe-solbat-ii/

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