The idea behind the Powermat system is one of simplicity – charge as many devices as you can using a single socket. For this to work you need to remove the main obstacles; those obstacles are generally in the form of custom, proprietary and generally different power adapters. What you have with the Powermat system is a charging mat that you place your device on and, well, it charges it – without the wires/adapters.

This site is called Wired4iPhone for a reason: we like iPhones. As such I will mainly concentrate on the iPhone Powermat solution and only briefly mention these ‘other devices’ that apparently exist. So, the obvious question is how do you charge your iPhone without connecting a lead? Well, basically you stick it in a Powermat case which has a direct connection into the “dock-connector” and a power receiver on the back. The case itself is sturdy, made out of a slightly rubberised plastic and adds around 3mm to the depth of the phone and about 6-8mm to the bottom where the dock connector fits into it. While it’s not overly bulky, the receiver does tend to cause an unsightly bulge in your pocket – perhaps if the case had been designed to blend into the receiver a bit more rather than sticking out so much then it may have ‘felt’ a bit better in your pocket. While in the case you can easily get to the power, and volume buttons but the silent switch is tricky to control though – it is easy to flick it away to put it into silent but, because of it’s proximity to the case, it is hard to actually pull back to turn silent mode off. The case also has openings at the base for the microphone and speaker.

So, your iPhone has it’s new jacket on so what next? Well, you need to charge it! This is beautifully simple – put it on the charging mat. Yes, that’s it – no fiddling with the lead, simply place it on one of the ‘dots’ on the mat. These ‘dots’ are magnetic so if you are very slightly off target it will pull it into place. You will also get a confirmatory noise and the white LED will glow (both the sound and lights can be turned off). This particular mat has 3 charge points but you will also be able to buy single point mats in the near future – these were on display at MWC but are not yet on the Powermat website. The Powermat will not overcharge your iPhone as it detects when it is fully charged and turns off the supply. I’m pretty sure it is all more technological that this but from an end-user point of view it’s all very simple!

Rather annoyingly the Powermat iPhone case does not use the standard iPhone sync lead, instead the case has a micro-USB connection (the lead is included). The case is actually quite tricky to remove so unless you have another micro-USB lead in the car then you will start to get fed up with the whole set up…

Another disadvantage is the likelihood that you are the only person you know with a Powermat set up. This means when you go away you either need to take the Powermat with you (a normal charger is way smaller) or remove the case (somewhat defeating the point). This is, however, a chicken and egg situation: as more people use Powermat, more charging points will be available, but without the availability of public or commonplace mats then fewer people might be inclined to use the system…

All is not lost though, at MWC the company were showing off their OEM kit along with a camcorder battery, smartphone battery and kettle all with Powermat built in. Once companies see the potential of such a system then it should be easier to get your device(s) charged.

As well as the iPhone case you can also get an add-on for a Nintendo DS, back plate for Blackberry, iPod dock and the Powercube. I managed to get a Powercube and iPod dock for this review.

The iPod dock is adjustable according to which model you have and does a good job of holding your ipod in place thanks to a rubber grip. Again, to charge you place the dock on the charge mat. The Powercube is for practically everything else. It contains a receiver, a mini-USB fly-lead and a box of adapters. The adapters fit onto the mini-USB and allow you to connect various phones and devices. It’s quite handy and they’ve even printed the adaptor type onto each one in case you get your Samsung mixed up with Sony Ericsson! This brings us back to the chicken and egg again, you have more adapters and leads than if you just took a single charger but then if more places had a Powermat available then it would actually give you less to carry.

Overall it’s a good system. The parts are well made and don’t feel cheap. Perhaps that is because they’re not cheap! The set up below costs a rather staggering £169.96 (Powermat £69.99, iPhone case £34.99, iPod dock £34.99, Powercube £29.99). Again, once something like this becomes more common place then the prices may drop – or at least I would hope so!

The whole thing works well but is let down somewhat by the lack of places, for example hotels, who offer a Powermat as a service. But then more people must embrace the technology before anything like that will happen. If they hurry up and market the replacement smart phone batteries they had on show, as well as pushing the OEM take up, then it could speed up the whole process.

So, what are the other options? Well, as Apple rightly advertise: ‘There’s an App for That’ although in this case there are 3 that do the job and are currently available in the UK AppStore. In alphabetical order we have: ‘Album Mixer – Shuffle by Album‘, ‘iAlbum Player‘ and ‘Quick Music‘.

Here follows a brief rundown of the pros and cons of each app.

iAlbumPlayer

I didn’t get off to a good start with this app. On first run it told me I had no music on my iPhone and that I should change some auto-skip settings. I couldn’t even FIND any settings but later realised it is one of those annoying apps that require you to close it to change any settings. Once closed you go to the main iPhone settings and scroll down to find the app. Here you can turn on/off ‘autoplay at launch’ and ‘auto-skip’. Auto-skip has two further settings to choose a minimum rating and a mysterious ‘track lacking’ (which I THINK is the minimum number of tracks in an album). Both these have an option of ‘never’ implying the app should play the album regardless of rating or number of tracks. However, even after setting both to ‘never’ the app still told me to change the auto-skip settings and that there were no music albums on my iPhone. Occasionally it would play an album and the screen did look nice and clear but by this point I’d given up with iAlbumPlayer. In theory I should be able to press the stack of CDs on the main screen and it plays me a random album but it’s too buggy for me to even bother. I’m impatient, and this app has now felt my wrath! A shame really, as this seems to have the nicest looking display once it decides to actually play something!

Album Mixer: Shuffle by Album

On launch you are faced with a big ‘shuffle albums’ button along with ‘filter’, ‘settings’ and some play controls. Good, the settings are easy to get to! Within the settings you can select how many albums you want the app to shuffle, set the app to shuffle on launch and also choose shake to shuffle. As I mainly use my iPhone in the car I always turn off shake to shuffle features as pot holes and speed bumps usually give undesired results…! For the purpose of this review I turned it on, shook my phone and, yes, it worked! In use it is as simple as pressing the big ‘shuffle albums’ button and a playlist of random albums is generated. It shows the album art on screen and, as the playlist is already generated, closing the app or putting your iPod/iPhone into standby means you can still listen to the albums in order. Back in the app you can shuffle the albums at any time, skip between tracks and also skip between albums.  You also have a ‘filter’ button that puts all your music genres and playlists into a single list. Selecting multiple items from this list will filter which albums will be chosen when you next shuffle. I like this app; it does what it was designed for with enough settings to fine tune your playlist too. The only downside, in my opinion, is the track names are illegible at the bottom and the artist and album title are quite small too.

Quick Music

This app isn’t specifically an album shuffler but it does have it as one of it’s advertised features.The main purpose of the app is to select music quickly. You can shuffle all your tracks; define your favourite artist and play only their tracks; define and play your favourite album; play tracks by a single random artist; and, the important one, play a random album. The settings are accessible from within the app and give you the option to start any of the play modes at startup (eg play favourite album at startup). You can also set your favourite artist and album here. Looking solely at the shuffle album feature here, it is slightly lacking. Yes, it will play a random album but as it only chooses a single album it means once the album finishes you need to open the app again to choose the next one. On a short journey this would be fine but on a long trip where you would normally listen to 4 or 5 albums it would get slightly frustrating having to continuously restart the app and/or press the ‘Play a random album’ button. When an album is playing the bulk of the screen is taken up by the play options and the artwork and track title seems squeezed in at the top. You can, however, put the iPhone into standby and view the full album artwork by viewing the lock screen though.

The purpose of reviewing these apps was to find a way to reinstate the Shuffle by Album feature that Apple disabled. As such, the clear winner is AlbumMixer: Shuffle by Album although the text size used in the app is miniscule, the actual album shuffle feature is very well implemented. Second place, and only because it isn’t actually specifically an album, shuffler, is Quick Music. Third place goes to iAlbumPlayer as it is too buggy to use.

Please note this now appears to be a bug which is being fixed.

A recent app that I, like many others, bought on the AppStore with real money appears to have suddenly stopped working. A simple application called Night Stand, which is now copied by other app developers in true AppStore style, designed to simply display the time and alarm while dimming the screen. Not exactly a controversial app to say the least and has been available for some time! Now it seems that you can load the app but it simply won’t run.

This app has also been tested on a colleagues phone with the same results. This is not as a result of any updates as it was seen to work recently and, stranger still, the app has been pulled from the AppStore itself. As of this moment I have not yet been able to find any reason for it’s disappearance, but am more concerned about the fact that any app can seemingly be pulled from your device without warning or reason.

I paid good money for that app, all be it 59 pence but it is mine, or is it?