So back in 2006, a new charging technology came out; it was the Powermat,a new wireless charging device. The commercials showed you being able to just put your wireless devices on it and it would charge it. No wires, no tangled mess, just place and charge. I wanted to get one since I had many electronic devices and my charging area was a tangled mess of DS and PSP chargers. That is until I saw the price. It cost like $100, and that was just for the mat. I did some research, and it turns out that you'd need special cases for the "drop and charge" features, and each case was like $20 each. I was like "it's cool, but not hundreds of dollars cool." Well as luck would have it, I found one at a garage sale for $7. It was complete in box, still had all the adapters and the power cube. I doubt the original owner used it much. So what do I think of the $7 powermat? It's nifty.

How does it work? Well it uses induction charging to charge the devices. There's a lot of science that goes into it, but basically the mat emits a magnetic field and the receiver turns those magnetic waves into electricity. There's a lot of science that goes into it, but that's the general concept.

So what does it come with? The mat has 3 different spots for charging, but it only comes with 1 charging cube. Why 3 charging stations but only one receiver, well you can buy the cases or other chargers for it so you can use all 3 if you desired. I personally only have the 1 charging receiver, but one of my friends has a powermat as well and has an iPod dock charger in addition to the universal cube. The universal cube has a mini-usb tip so you plug your mini-usb charging devices in and it charges. What happens if your device isn't mini-usb, well it comes with 7 tips that plug onto the mini-usb; a micro-usb, an apple 30 pin connector tip, a nintendo DS lite tip, a nintendo DSi/XL/3DS/3DSXL tip, a PSP tip, an LG1 tip, and a Samsung 2 tip. Personally, I use the nintendo DS, PSP, and micro-usb tips predominantly because I have DSs and a PSP and my phone takes Micro-USB. I could use the mini-USB for my PS3 controllers, but normally I play my PS3 when charging the controllers, and the little bit of cord that the charging cube has isn't nearly long enough for playing and charging. If for some reason there isn't a tip for your device and it charges with a USB cable, or if you need 4 charging stations, there's a USB port for you to plug in another device.

So is it better than normal chargers? Yes but not by leaps and bounds. Unless you get the special cases, you still need to plug in your device. The charging cube and ipod dock don't plug in, but you need to plug your device into the cube or dock. What it does really well is that it doesn't have all the tangled cords of 4 chargers and looks much nicer than a nest of cords. I can leave it out in the open and it looks really sophisticated. It's a great universal charger. Is it worth the original $100+ originally? No, not in the least. At most, it's worth $25. I had a tangled nest of charging cables and it made it hard to get things plugged in occasionally, and this solves it. If you have many wireless devices and can get it for a good price, bet it. Otherwise, look elsewhere. Well this has been Pokematic signing off and bu-bye.