It's been about a year since I first set eyes on a prototype of Mobility Electronic's iGo Juice at last year's Fall Comdex and committed to testing one once it started shipping.

Who would want an iGo Juice? Just about anybody who travels with a notebook, PDA, cell phone, or all three, and wants the ability to charge those devices with a single charger that can connect to a wall outlet, a car's cigarette lighter, or an airplane seat outlet. Although the iGo Juice supports most popular devices, it wasn't without its quirks in my tests. But considering the range of technology problems to which most road warriors are accustomed, iGo Juice owners should find the device's handful of quirks tolerable and easy to work around.

My first opportunity to thoroughly test iGo Juice was on a recent eight-hour road trip to Ottawa. Most road warriors are great practitioners of productivity when they're held captive in an airplane. Long contiguous blocks of uninterrupted time provide a golden opportunity to take care of e-mail overload, fill out overdue expense reports, or simply reorganize one's hard drive..

My trip to Ottawa wasn't the first time that I would try to get some work done from the front seat of my '92 Cherokee (with my wife driving, of course). Last Christmas, I used Xtend Micro Product's PowerXtender to power my notebook on a 10-hour drive. One of the PowerXtender's shortcomings was its inability to keep a notebook and cell phone charged simultaneously. I needed two separate chargers that had to take turns using the cigarette lighter in an effort to make sure neither device's battery ever became fully depleted. But, because of iGo Juice's ability to charge two devices simultaneously (a notebook and a cell phone, or a notebook and a PDA), the trip to Ottawa was free of such power rotations.

This ability to charge two devices simultaneously isn't included in the iGo Juice's $100 street price. While the outbound power side (the device-side) of the iGo Juice is designed to fork to two devices, you'll have to buy a separate $20 cable specific to the model type of your secondary device (phone or PDA) that snaps into the junction point where the outbound power cable forks. For the drive to Ottawa, the secondary device I tested was a Motorola i85s cell phone (the same cable supports all iDEN phones sold by Nextel). The notebook computer that the iGo Juice kept in business for the eight-hour haul was an IBM ThinkPad T40.

In addition to its adaptability on the inbound supply side to wall, car, or airplane outlets, one nice feature of the iGo Juice on the device-side is its easy adaptability to most popular notebook computers. To achieve this adaptability, the iGo Juice uses a small, easy-to-swap power tip that marries its device-side cable to your specific model of notebook computer. Although we didn't try this, this flexibility meant that my wife (who uses a Dell) and I could take turns driving and, no matter which one of us was taking our turn at "computing," we could have power simply by substituting the tip. When I last checked, there were two SKUs for iGo Juice and the difference between the two was the list of 14 included tips (which equates to the list of notebook computers that each SKU supports). Based on my original interview with company officials, if you suddenly find yourself with a notebook that's not supported by the 14 original tips that came with your iGo Juice, you can contact the company and they'll send you the one you need free of charge.

While the iGo Juice worked perfectly when plugged into a wall outlet, there were some issues in the car and on an airplane worth noting.

One problem that revealed itself intermittently when we turned the car engine off was that, when the engine was restarted, the iGo Juice's blue power indicator wouldn't illuminate. Indeed, neither the notebook or the cell phone were receiving any power, and it wasn't until I disconnected iGo Juice from the two devices and from the cigarette lighter and then reconnected everything that the unit would restore itself to proper working order. Since it didn't happen every time the car was shut off, and the process only took a matter of seconds, it wasn't a major hassle.

When I first used the iGo Juice to keep the cell phone charged in the car, I thought, "Great! In addition to getting rid of the power supply that came with the notebook, I can also get rid of the car charger for cell phone." As it turns out, the iGo Juice should not be considered as a permanent substitute for your cell phone's dedicated car charger. On a road trip, there's a good chance the iGo Juice will follow the notebook indoors, keeping your notebook's battery at a 100 percent charge in the hotel room, while you could find yourself driving around with no power for your cell phone. Don't throw away that car charger just yet.

I encountered a slight problem on a plane as well. Once you've found a seat with inflight power-no small feat-- you'll become addicted to computing without the fear of running out of power. But in my test, where I used the iGo Juice connected to an inflight power outlet to simultaneously charge my notebook and my cell phone, only the notebook computer was receiving a charge. After the flight, I tried to simultaneously charge the two devices from my Jeep's cigarette lighter, and it seemed to work fine.

Admittedly, there aren't many situations where you'd have to keep two devices fully charged on an airplane, which is why the problem really doesn't concern me. Despite its limitations, the iGo Juice is well worth the $120 (or $140 if you want support for both a PDA and a phone, though not simultaneously) for any road warrior. Also, with the holidays rapidly approaching, this is one gift that won't disappoint.

You can write to me at david.berlind@cnet.com. If you're looking for my commentaries on other IT topics, check the archives.