Submitted by Eric Daniel
While having a wall charger for my iPod Shuffle (and the Nano for that matter) gave me the flexibility to charge the units in something other than a computer (which, in turn, needs its own power source) what I was ultimately looking for was a way to sever the power cable link all together.
It wasn't until someone sent me a reference on solar chargers that I thought about going that route, but once I did, it finally cut my dependency on generated power completely.
The charger I settled on was the Solio Classic universal charger. The charger itself is a collapsing three bladed affair. To charge the unit you spread out the three nested solar panels (much like the spreaders on a camo net pole) and set the unit in the sun. It takes about 8 hours to fully charge the unit, after which you can plug it into your device and transfer the power. The battery in the Solio will hold its charge for about a year, and in the event you have wall power, you can plug the unit into the wall to charge it in only a couple of hours. With no moving parts, the Solio is very durable, and has a wide operational temperature range (-4 to 131 degrees F.) Finally, it is adaptable to charging a variety of mobile phones, including Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, and LG.
