Clipper Gear Cell Phone Emergency Battery Recharger

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CNET editors' rating: 3.0 stars Good
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Product summary

The good: The Clipper Gear is compact and light. With it, a 20-minute charge yields 25 minutes of talk time, and it uses replaceable AAA batteries.

The bad The bad: The Clipper Gear has a flimsy design and a spotty power connector. It's also too bulky to keep attached to a handset during a phone call.

The bottom line: The battery-powered, bargain-priced Clipper Gear charger will revive your dead cell phone in a pinch, but its shoddy construction leaves something to be desired.

CNET editors' review

Reviewed by: Ben Patterson
Edited by: Kent German
Reviewed on: 01/31/2006

The Clipper Gear Cell Phone Emergency Battery Recharger is reasonably small, measuring just 2.8 by 1.8 by 0.6 inches, and weighs in at about 2.5 ounces with the four AAA batteries installed. While we liked the compact size, we weren't impressed by its flimsy black plastic shell, which doesn't look or feel all that rugged. Indeed, when we dropped the device on our kitchen floor from a distance of about three feet, the back panel popped open and the batteries went flying--not good.

As with the other chargers we tested, setup for the Clipper Gear was simple. Once we installed four AAA batteries and snapped the case shut, we plugged in an adapter for our test Motorola V600 and attached it to our phone's charger port. (The kit comes with adapters for Nokia, Siemens, Motorola, and Sony Ericsson phones.) At first, our phone didn't charge at all. After a little trial and error, we realized the culprit was a loose connection between the phone adapter and the charger's power port--yet another quality-assurance miscue.

In our tests, we first tried charging our dead Motorola V600 for five minutes. Our phone started up fine, and we were able to place a call, but we only got a minute of talk time. When we tried a 20-minute charge, however, the results were much better; we clocked a full 25 minutes of talk time, more than enough for an emergency call or two. That said, we had a tough time using the phone with the charger attached; because of the spotty adapter connection, our Moto V600 kept dying on us.

See more CNET content tagged:: adapter,; Motorola Inc.,; cell phone,; battery

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