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Media Playing, Power Saving & Super Gardening Tools
Trevor Balis, who invented windup re-chargeable products and started the hugely popular Freeplay range has come up with some amazing new products which are being marketed under his own name.
The best of these has to be the Eco Media Player, a personel entertainment device, which can store and play MP3s, still pictures, ebooks and videos. Additionally it has a built-in FM radio, can do voice and music recordings, has an emergency phone charging feature and an LED torch. Requiring no batteries it is recharged either by USB connection or by winding the built-in generator. The latter is surprisingly efficient giving up to 40 minutes playback from 1 minutes easy winding.
It is well designed and pleasant to use once the invariable frustrations of getting it set up are overcome. It connects to a computer by USB cable and appears on the desktop as a removable hard drive. You can then drag and drop music and picture files onto it. I did this successfully on both Macs and PCs, though the files from Macs produced an unreadable shadow of themselves which needed to be deleted.
I found that pictures worked best if resized to the size suggested in the handbook and that it was easier to delete and reorder thing using the computer rather than the internal menus. Videos need to be in a proprietary format and a convertor programme is supplied on the CD provided. This runs on Windows XP and above but I haven’t tried this out yet.
All in all I have enjoyed testing the Eco Media Player, the earphones are particularly good being very small and comfortable to wear. The radio is great though it needs a fairly strong signal as the headphones double as an aerial. The internal memory holds about 500 music tracks and SD cards can be used to increase capacity. Currently these are very cheap and the media player can take sizes up to 4Gb (about another 1,000 music tracks), quite enough for me anyway.
The 1.8 inch colour screen is bright and clear and the internal mini speaker lets you share your video clips or music with friends. I have tried the emergency phone charging and much to my amazement it worked, though I have yet to get a Nokia to accept a charge. The very useful telephone support line (01273 736896) assure me it will work if my phone runs down enough and I will take their word for it.
This ability to charge phones in an emergency is shared by the sister product the Eco Pro Torch. This is a light and easy to wind, LED torch which throws a very good pool of light. Ideal for walking with and general use.
I have also been testing a Powersafer Standby Saver unit which switches on and off my TV, DVD,Video and AV amp. This works well, and once set responds to the power button on any of the remote controls. This has been saving 25 watts an hour for the last 6 months, so well worthwhile and almost foolproof.
I have an Electrisave Monitor to show the total electrical use at home and I still consider it the best piece of equipment for reducing consumption. The good news is they have dropped in price by a third, now called Owl Monitors they are more sensibly priced at £52.50 and well worth the investment. Their only drawback being that they use AA batteries, a problem I have been able to solve by using Pure Energy rechargeables. These Canadian-made batteries are as environmentally friendly as possible, contain no toxic metals, have the life of 100 disposables and as far as I know, uniquely for this type of battery, produce a full 1.5V and work straight out of the packet.
Enough of this techie stuff, I have been using a couple of nice tools in the garden. The first is an Opinal Folding Saw, which has a carbon steel blade and a beechwood handle. It cuts cleanly through green roundwood and is a good all round pruning and craft saw which is largely distinguished from the competition by it’s lovely wooden handle.
The other product is the Leatherman Hybrid multitool which features bypass pruners, saw, weeding tool, and a range of other useful small tools. Easy to carry round and more comfortable to use than I expected, this has become my gardening tool of choice.
John Adams
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Trevor Balis Eco Media Player.
Trevor Balis Eco Pro Torch.
Powersafer Standby Saver.
Owl Monitor.
Pure Energy Enviro Charger.
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