Pelican PSP Power Brick Review

As every owner most likely realizes by now, the PSP's battery is not its most robust component. Delivering approximately between 3-9 hours of power depending on the activity, the PSP battery pack is adequate for most folks, if not exactly overwhelming. For those out there who plan on playing the machine quite often in Wi-Fi mode, or plan on watching several UMDs on a long flight, a power backup plan wouldn't be the worst idea.

Enter the Pelican Power Brick. Retailing at $19.99 (half the price of an extra official battery), the Power Brick offers an affordable and quite portable power source for the PSP. The Power Brick package is quite simple: a small (2 7/8" x 2 3/4" x 1/2"), black, rectangular power source, and a small cord with a smaller end to connect to the brick and a PSP-sized end to connect to the PSP's "DC In" port.

This left us with one question: How do we charge the Power Brick?

Fortunately, the answer is pretty intuitive — you charge the Power Brick using the same AC/DC charger that comes with the PSP. The brick itself features a "DC In" port, into which you insert the PSP's charger, and a small LED light to indicate it's charging status. This LED light blinks, rather incessantly, while the Power Brick is charging. Once finished, the LED stays on until it is unplugged. In our testing, the Power Brick came in with charging times of four hours and ten minutes, four hours eight minutes, and four hours and eleven minutes, which is in keeping with the advertised four hour charge time. It should be noted that it is possible to charge the Power Brick while it is charging the PSP, but we did not test this functionality due to the unlikely circumstances under which that would take place.

The back of the Power Brick's retail package lists it as taking three hours to charge the PSP (if the PSP is not on). Unfortunately, we found this claim nearly impossible to test as the PSP's Power/Charging indicator light never turned off, as it does when finished charging directly from the charger. Our testing found that it took roughly three hours fifteen minutes to charge the PSP from the Power Brick, but again this is an estimate. We do know for a fact that the PSP wasn't fully charged after three hours during any of our testing.

The packaging also claims to completely charge the PSP twice from one full charge on the Power Brick. We did not find this to be the case. On the second charge, our PSP reached charged levels of 38, 44, and 48 percent. Again, these numbers may have been slightly higher had we been able to unplug the Power Brick as soon as the PSP was charged the first time, but we seriously doubt any real world user would be patiently waiting for the Power Brick to finish its first charge of the PSP anyway, leading us to believe that under optimum conditions the most you could expect from the second charge is 50 percent.

The Power Brick can also charge the PSP while it is being played, and we expect this to be the way it will be used more often than not. The Power Brick packaging states that "Charge times will vary if playing while recharging," and we found this to be the case. In our tests it took the Power Brick close to four and a half hours to charge the PSP while playing a game, but again, this was impossible to test exactly — only this time, it was due to the PSP's power light being on due to play, not incompatibility.

Overall, we found the Power Brick to be a decent, if not great, option for PSP users who need power on-the-go. Although it falls short of several of its advertised claims, it still stands as a reasonably priced (and slightly more convenient) alternative to the relatively expensive official Sony PSP replacement battery. Hopefully Pelican can take this already good product design and improve it's technology to make it a little more robust and compatible with the PSP's Power indicator. Until then, it remains a "just average" product.