Buy It And Try It: Super Battery

"Geeks and nerds have come out of the closet," says Dustin Baly of XTreme Geek.

"I think nerds are the bottom of the barrel and geeks are cool, if you know what I mean," adds Gina Manea.

They are extreme geeks, as in they work at Rancho Cordova's XTreme Geeks store where they sell the latest gadgets, like roll up keyboards. If it's new technology, they got it.

So we decided they should test the new Super Battery, a power pack you can use to charge up your cell phone, iPod, even PDA. It says you can power your gadgets anywhere anytime.

You charge the Super Battery by plugging it in, or in an emergency it says you can actually generate power by cranking it.

Before trying it out, we carefully followed the directions plugging it into the wall for 12-hours. Fully charged we decide to see if it really supplies power to our gadgets. It comes with adapters for certain cell phones.

First we plug the Super Battery into our first phone, and sure enough it starts charging, but when we test two more phones we quickly realize, there isn't an adaptor that fits them.

And on our 4th phone, there's an adaptor but check this out it says it's not charging.

How about when we plug in the Superbattery to an iPod?

It's charging. But what we're really curious about is this crank feature. It says for 2 minutes of cranking, you get 5-minutes of cell phone talk time or 2-minutes of music play on an iPod.

So we leave these geeks with the task of draining the Super Battery and a cell phone, and iPod.

We come back a couple days later and put it to the test.

Remember two minutes of cranking, we're supposed to get 5-minutes of talk time.

So Dustin calls his wife but he gets voicemail. To make sure we test the claim fully he has to leave a 5-minute long message.

"Hi honey, I'm on the air…I love you honey, how are the kids?" Says Baly.

But just 2-minutes in the cell phone dies, far short of the 5-minutes.

"It doesn't live up to expectations that were set in the instructions," comments Baly.

How does it work on a dead iPod? This time we let Gina crank for 2-minutes, to see if we get 2-minutes of play time.

The power comes on. We press play, but 9 seconds into the song it dies. No full two minutes of music.

"I'm pretty disappointed, I didn't get to hear my Wichita Wyman," says Manea.

So in the end this is they're advice to anyone thinking about buying the Super Battery:

"I would say if you plug this device in the night before into your ac wall adaptor, it will charge your products... but maybe not the cranking feature," says Manea.

"If I was stuck somewhere after an earthquake, trapped and all I had was this, I'd crank my heart out, and I think it would charge this up," adds Baly.

Remember, it does say the cranking should be just for an emergency.

As for adaptors, it comes with a couple and you can go online and buy more if you need one to fit your phone.

The Super Battery retails for about $45.