Hasta La Gadget!

Welcome to Engadget’s back to school guide! Today we’re talking docks. Head to the back to school hub to see the rest of the product guides as they’re added throughout the month. Be sure to keep checking back; in early September, we’ll be giving away a ton of gear, including some of the picks in our guides.

Plug and play… and then party in your dorm. That’s how the kids do it nowadays, with their iPods, iPhones and Android devices connected to virtual libraries of stored and streaming music. But unless you’re rocking an HTC One with BoomSound, the dinky speakers on your daily driver just aren’t going to adequately pump out the late-summer jams. For those at-home boogie breakdowns, you’re going to need some serious hardware. And lucky you, we’re here to sort through the clutter and highlight the best back to school picks for any budget.

Filed under: Peripherals

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It’s been awhile since we last heard about Griffin‘s PowerDock 5 charging station — back in January at CES, in fact. However, the company finally launched the new product today and is touting it as a central place to charge all of your mobile devices, including tablets, complete with five charging bays with their own USB port.

What’s quite unique about the PowerDock 5 is that it includes clear plastic dividers that separate each of the charging bays, but they also act as a support for leaning your mobile devices against, and they’re strong enough to support a full-size iPad. Griffin is marketing the PowerDock 5 for iOS device, but we reckon it can be used with just about any other device as well.

As for specifics, each USB port is rated at 10 watts (5 volts DC @ 2.1 amps). 2.1 amps is enough to adequately charge a tablet and the extra amperage can charge a smartphone faster than the traditional 1 amp would, but if there’s anything you should know about battery health, it’s that battery life can degrade over time if you overuse amps when charging a phone, so that’s something to keep in mind for the future.

We took a gander of the charging station at CES and were surprised by how light it was. It’s essentially made entirely of plastic with a rubber base on the bottom to prevent it from sliding around on tabletops. As mentioned, the plastic dividers seemed strong enough to support even the heaviest of mobile devices.

The PowerDock 5 is priced at $99.99 and is available on Belkin’s website. We should also be seeing it pop up on retailer website as well in the next few weeks as the device becomes more ubiquitous. $100 is certainly a pretty price to pay for five USB ports, but if you’re looking for a neat solution during parties where your friends can charge up, the PowerDock 5 could make the shortlist.

Griffin PowerDock 5 arrives as five-port charging station is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.

BenQ doesn’t see the limelight that often, but their aim is set high. The company announced the Joybee GP3 portable projector which comes with an iPhone/iPod dock that allows users to project content that’s stored on their iOS devices. There’s also a new feature that can wirelessly stream content from other devices over a DLNA connection.

This new projector is the successor to the GP2, and BenQ claims it comes with improved brightness and better contrast. The GP3 can also project images up to 160 inches in diagonally, and it has a 2-watt built-in speaker, although it most likely won’t do the trick in a slightly larger room, so a pair of external speakers may come in handy in this case.

Of course, though, the main new feature on this palm-sized projector is the iPhone dock (using the older 30-pin connection). However, if you don’t have an iPhone, the projector offers several other ways to hook up media to the device, including plugging in a flash drive and microSD card, as well as wirelessly streaming content from another mobile device or PC.

There’s also 2GB of storage tucked inside in case a flash drive or microSD card is too much for you, although that probably won’t be enough for a couple of movies, but an album-full of photos would be the perfect fit. The internal battery is said to last 2.5 hours, which will get you through at least a movie and some, so be prepared to take the charger along with you. The GP3 is expected to ship later this month, but no pricing details have been disclosed yet.

BenQ Joybee GP3 projector comes dock-ready for iPhones is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

After over a year of waiting, Belkin has finally released its Thunderbolt Express Dock. It was originally announced last year in January and was slated for a September 2012 release, but that obviously never happened. However, Belkin just launched the $299 dock yesterday, and we’ve taken the time to give it a good look-over and test it out for ourselves. Personally, as a MacBook Pro user who is constantly docking and undocking my laptop at my desk, I wanted to see if Belkin’s Thunderbolt Express Dock would make the whole process easier. Let’s find out how it fared.

Design-wise, the Express Dock is made to blend in perfectly with Apple’s line of Mac machines. It rocks an aluminum unibody shell with black plastic panels on the sides and back, and just like a good mullet, there’s not a lot going on in the front, but there’s a party in the back — all the ports are situated on the rear of the dock. You’ll find an ethernet port, a FireWire 800 port, three USB 3.0 ports, two Thunderbolt ports (which support daisy-chaining), and separate 3.5mm audio-out and audio-in jacks.

One of the two Thunderbolt ports is used to plug the dock into your Mac, but that’s all it takes to get access to all the other ports. Instead of having to plug all of your peripherals in one after another every time you dock your MacBook at your desk, all you have to do is plug everything into the Express Dock when setting it up, and then just simply plug in the dock into your Thunderbolt port. At that point, you’ll be all set to go. This fact alone I found really convenient as I didn’t have all these cables that I had to keep plugging and unplugging every time I wanted to undock my MacBook. It’s just one single cable and you’re good to go.

While the Express Dock will work for desktop Macs like the iMac and Mac Pro, it’s essentially meant for those with MacBooks, which don’t have a lot of options when it comes to ports, especially MacBook Air users. If you use a MacBook as your main machine and want more port options, the Express Dock is about the only convenient option out there. Simply plug in the dock into your Thunderbolt port and you’ll instantly have eight more ports at your perusal, which is pretty fantastic.

However, there are some caveats. The Express Dock doesn’t come with a Thunderbolt cable in the box, so you’ll want to make sure that you have one on hand in order to connect it to your Mac. Secondly, the Express Dock requires OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion to take advantage of all its capabilities. The dock will at least work on older versions of OS X, and I was able to hook up a Thunderbolt display to the dock, but it wouldn’t recognize any of the USB 3.0 drives that I had on hand, nor would the audio ports work. However, once I connected it to a Mountain Lion machine, everything worked flawlessly.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the USB 3.0 ports on the Express Dock are limited to 2.5Gbps, which is almost half the speed of what it’s supposed to be at (4.8Gbps). We’re not exactly sure why this is, but it’s still much faster than USB 2.0, which Macs are still sadly stuck at (unless you have one of the newest models). I also noticed that the dock would get hot after a short while, including both ends of the Thunderbolt cable. Nothing exploded, thankfully, but it was always a bit of a concern after I had it plugged in for an hour or so and had tons of things plugged into it. It never got hot enough that I couldn’t touch it, but I was certainly surprised that it gets a bit warm.

Portability is another thing to consider, especially since the dock is catered towards MacBooks. The Express Dock is lightweight and can easily fit into a backpack to take with you. However, the power adapter that’s required to power the Express Dock makes the device not too portable-friendly. It’s about the same size as a typical laptop power adapter, which isn’t a bad thing, since they’re also made to be portable along with the laptop its charging, but if you were to take both your MacBook and the Express Dock with you on the road, you now have two bulky power adapters to deal with. The dock can certainly be portable, but it’s really up to the user whether or not lugging it along will be worth it.

In the end, Belkin’s Thunderbolt Express Dock is the perfect companion to a MacBook power user. However, you’ll have to think long and hard about whether or not you truly need it, since it costs a whopping $300, so it isn’t just something that you can buy impulsively. There is a cheaper option available for $250, but that’s still a hard pill to swallow. Then again, if you’re like me and constantly find yourself docking and undocking your MacBook, dealing with a tangle of numerous wires at the same time, the Express Dock could be one of the best convenience products that you ever buy. Plus, if you’re rocking a MacBook Air and wish you had more ports at your disposal, the Express Dock is a good choice for that too.

Belkin Thunderbolt Express Dock Review is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

If you absolutely can’t trust your kid to avoid texting while he’s driving the family car, the ORIGOsafe provides a brute-force way to keep them focused on the road. It’s a smartphone dock that prevents a vehicle from actually starting until a phone is inserted, ensuring the distraction remains out of sight. More »