Freeloader Pro

[ Music ] ^M00:00:04 >> Brian: Hello folks, Brian Cooley here at CES 2010. You know, some of you who knew me probably know I'm not a real big camper. I mean camping to me is a Holiday Inn. But this is a very interesting piece of gear for those of you who are or outdoorsy [assumed spelling] or are doing a lot of things away from shore power. It's called the Free Loader Pro. Now, if I move it around you can start to see a solar panel right there and that's the first dead give-away of what this is. It is a solar charging device. You would take it and sort of separate these 2 wings, reassemble them this way, they now become part of a whole that are gathering solar light and charging an internal battery, a pretty large one that lives in this very sleek looking aluminum, aluminized, at least, shell case. You press the button right here in the middle if you want to find out your charge state. See how that goes about, oh, half way around with blue light? That means you got about a half a charge; this will pick up light from any natural sun source not just a bright sunny day but also an overcast day. It'll charge slower then. So 8 hours to a full charge for this thing under bright sun, as much as 12 hours under one of those hazy days but that's not the interesting part. What you do after this is charged is then connect it to whatever portable you have via a typical USB cable that goes into a USB port, which is right there on the side. That's a USB A connector and you push that in there and then this adapter; this tip goes to one of any of, I don't know, 7 or 8 adapters for different products from mini USB to what looks like iPhone, iPod. I see a couple proprietary like Nokia tips in here. So this will charge or run your device. How long, 70 hours talk time, they say, on a typical, you know, basic cell phone, get 28 hours of audio playback on an iPod and maybe up to 3 hours of running your Garmin off of one of these with that big bright display running the whole time and the GPS radio working, so that's pretty impressive stuff. It gets even more interesting after that though. This goes along with it it's called The Cam Caddy. It's kind of a universal battery charger. So I can move this little thing down kind of like one of those little gadgets they used to use to size you up for a pair of shoes. You put whatever battery you want in there with the leads or the contacts on your battery touching those pins which can be adjusted on the back to match up to where your contacts are on your battery, and then you let this thing spring, hold it in there. I'm gonna turn it like so and it holds those pins against the contacts. Now, what if you're not on the contacts or what if you got the polarity backwards, the positive negative thing? Well, if you do you're gonna get a red light here because it's got a polarity sensor and this switch will change the polarity from positive to negative to make sure you get it right. When the red light goes out you're all set to charge this thing, again, from your Free Loader solar battery pack, so this is gonna charge any kind of battery and with all those proprietary batteries that come in different products today it's nice not to have to carry a separate charger dock for each one. So this is almost as cool as the mother ship itself. This whole rig is gonna go for 100 bucks. It comes out in just a few weeks, so by the time you see this it might already be out but it's a mid to late January 2010 roll out. That's the Free Loader Pro. So, again, it's this solar charger with integrated battery, the connecting cable, this cam caddy universal battery charger and a whole mess of these tips to hook up to your device. I'm Brian Cooley here at CES 2010. ^M00:03:15 [ Music ]