Digital Trends

If you've ever longed for in-seat power during long flights, Inflight Power invites you to look no further than the nearest headphone jack.

Now that you have all sorts of high-tech toys to keep you and yours alternately entertained, distracted, or pacified during mind-numbingly long flights, you've probably noticed you're carting around all sorts of extra batteries to keep those gizmos going—or else fervently wishing for flight delays while you surreptitiously charge up devices at those all-too-rare electrical outlets in airports.

If your power needs aren't to excessive, the Inflight USB Power Unit might just do the trick for you. The concept is ingenious: plug the unit into a headset or audio output jack in your airplane seat, max out the volume, and the unit converts the tiny amount of electrical output from the audio signal into regulated USB power.

Admittedly, it's not a lot of power: the device takes between three to five minutes to fully charge its internal trickle charger off the audio output, then sends the stored power to the attached USB device (such as a phone or music player) over the course of about a minute. So, every three to five minutes, your device gets a minute of juice. If you're using the device, that might be enough to significantly increase in-flight utility; if you're just trying to charge up a cell phone or iPod, it might be enough to build up a significant charge over the course of a flight. The unit features an LED to let you know when it's ready to charge a device, and the cable is FCC-certified not to emit radio noise, so you can use it anytime audio is available. The charger tends to work better with music channels than talk channels (music has more-or-less continuous output: talk is often on-and-off).

The Inflight USB power Unit can be converted to over 700 devices with a series of tips using Gomadic's TipExchange technology. The cable itself is priced at $34.99; a $49.99 version adds a Gomadic TipExchange bundle, and additional tips are available for $4.99 apiece.