All eyes now turn to the weather with next weekend just about in range of the 5-day weather forecasting abilities. And the outlook for Glastonbury Festival is … wet. Constantly wet. Something like 80% cloud for 80% of the time. Bah!
More annoying than the mud itself, which is fairly annoying, is spending £50 on a solar powered device which aims to charge the batteries of my various mobile devices (PDAs, games consoles, GPS units etc. – or in this case just my mobile phone). Not going to be much help if the sun doesn’t shine!
All of which is a shame because the Solio that I now have is actually quite good. I left it in the morning sun in an east-facing window which could only have got about 6 hours of sunlight over two days (and not even particularly bright sunshine either). This was enough to give an iPod mini a 75% charge. There is one caveat though: “expectations”. I have found that the Solio is perfect for devices that require comparatively little power like an iPod, or one of those monochrome Nokia phones that go for five days without a charge. For higher-powered gadgets like BlackBerries, PDA phones or PlayStation Portables you may be disappointed because the Solio’s internal battery just isn’t as big as those on the power-hungry machines.
I’ll find out after this weekend whether there was any point in buying one at all. If only they made rain-powered phone chargers…
