- The Expansion Sleeve
- The Portable Printer
- Extra Battery Power
- The Portable Keyboard
- More To Come...
Extra Battery Power
We mentioned that the expansion sleeve adds an extra battery; this is key, since it doubles the life of your iPAQ battery. It's great when using your setup to watch a full-length movie on a plane. Yes, you can run Pocket DivX, slide in a 1GB SD card with a compressed movie, and watch a full-length feature on your PDA!
But when we're on the road giving a crucial presentation, we want to make sure to build in even more battery redundancy. Nothing works as well here as a portable Pocket PC battery charger. We chose the high-quality charger from Semsons.com (see Figure 3). It retails for $20, but we found it on sale for $7.
Figure 3 Extra battery chargers are crucial when depending on a wearable office.
This portable charger has a universal fit for all iPAQs and holds four AA-sized batteries. However, don't put in 1.5v alkaline batteries, since that's a total of 6 volts. Your iPAQ uses only 5 volts; 6 volts could damage it. For example, at one point I had to use a 5.5v Dell Axim charger and my iPAQ became red-hot to the touch. For the expansion charger we're going to buy, you'll need to use four NiMH or NiCad rechargeable batteries at 1.2 volts each. That setup should add 100%200% more battery life than the default Pocket PC battery.
iPAQ Battery charger (Model PDA-B001) from Semsons.com: On sale for $7.