Apple Thoughts: Nifty Gadget O' The Day: The Powerstick

"The Powerstick is the winner of the CES Award for Best of Innovation. It charges mobile devices such as BlackBerrys, cell phones, smart phones, PDAs, iPhones, iPods, digital cameras, GPS and MP3 Players. It is simply charged from any USB port including computers and laptops and then used to charge mobile devices; no disposable batteries or wall chargers are required."

I was sitting at my desk Monday morning and the owner of my company came in and plopped this down on my desk. "I thought you'd like this," he said. The company gave it to him as a promo so he passed it along to me. I have to say, it's one of the coolest gadgets I've played around with in awhile.

Essentially, you plug it into your USB port and it charges the internal battery. It takes about 3 hours or so to go from stone dead to fully charged. When you're done, cap it and put it in your bag along with one of the ten included tips and you're good to go. If your phone dies, just plug your tip into the charger and then other end into your phone and press the button. Within a few minutes, your phone should be fully charged. My iPhone was down to 25% of its battery and in one hour, the PowerStick had it fully charged.

I tried it out with my iPhone and it charges it perfectly. Right now, Powerstick's website has them available from Best Buy for $59.99 and while that sounds like a lot, it does come with a lot of interchangeable tips including a Mini USB so you should be able to charge more than one device when needed. That alone makes it worth the cost.