Buy Life Gear LL01Y LifeLight

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List Price: $42.70
Sale Price: $24.95
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So far I really like this little lantern. It's hard to do fine tuning on the radio, but you can use your mp3 player, so who cares. It doesn't come with a cell adapter, you have to purchase it (pay s&h), but since you can charge your cell that's pretty not too bad. The face looks waterproof, but it's just a protective cover over the radio and nightlight. Speaking of the nightlight, it's one of my favorite things about this lantern. It only uses 1 LED to illuminate so you can save the battery and it lights pretty well. The siren seems pretty stupid though. It doesn't feel well made, the little handle on top comes right off, so replace it or don't rely on it for any sort of survival. All and all pretty good, and great for the money, but I would have paid ten dollars more if it had been waterproof and had a rope handle or something permanently attached.

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The light certainly is pretty darn useful especially for the price(I paid $15), but as good as some of its features are, some of its weak points are rather glaring in contrast.

First the strengths:

-It holds quite a bit of charge per cranks. A minute's worth of crank seems to give half hours worth of radio and/or light.

-The radio reception is fairly good though my first one had broken AM reception(Amazon promptly replaced of course). The volume level was surprisingly loud as well.

-The light level is adequate to get around in dark places. I wouldn't rely on it to walk along a cliff or anything, but it's good enough to keep you on path or find stuff around the house during black outs.

-Most of its features are actually useful. Light, radio, cell phone charger, and headphone jack to connect an MP3 player or likes are all fairly useful.

Few thing that could use improvements:

-The light, while adequate, isn't exactly great. Perhaps it's the limitations of the crank power, but I wish the light could be brighter. Or perhaps more useful would be to have a directional light option. LifeLight works as a lantern, so it's an omni directional light source. It would have been great if they could have put some extra light at the bottom to use as a flash light.

-I understand it's difficult to create and manage adapters for all the cellphones out there, but it was disappointing to find that my cellphone wasn't listed in the adapter list. My phone is about a year old Samsung, and I don't think there's any reason they shouldn't have an adapter for it. The list of adapters they had seemed to contain older phones mostly in quick glance.

-They certainly could have made the tuning dial for the radio a bit bigger. It takes a bit of surgeons touch to tune in to a station. They should have added the weather band to the radio as well. No reason it shouldn't be there.

-The construction certainly could be better, but it's not too bad for the price. I do wish they would make $40-50 version that is rugged and weather-proof.

-The siren feature seems a bit tacked on. I'm not sure if its loud enough to be any actual use. The flashing light could perhaps signal SOS also instead of just blinking.

Well, there it is. I'm quite happy with the purchase. It's versatile, useful, and cheap. It certainly could use some improvements, but so do most things.

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I bought 3 of these for work when they were a deal-of-the-day. It seemed like a good thing to have in case of a power outage on the evening shift. The radio is a good feature in case of earthquake or other natural disaster.

The quality is decent for the price. Not as good as the Eton ones sold by the Red Cross, but they're 1/3 to 1/2 the price so if it's just going to sit in your emergency kit, it's probably a good way to go.

It can run on 3 AAA batteries or a charge by the crank. It says a 1 minute charge will last 45 minutes. I'm wondering if this may be dependent on what features you use. I started to see the intensity of the LEDs decrease after about 5 minutes, but I would call them usable until maybe 20-25 minutes before I'd need to turn the crank again.

There are 3 sets of 3 white LEDs and you can have either all 9 on or only 3. There are also 6 red LEDs that flash. You can have them flashing instead of using the white lights. There is a nightlight feature (single LED on the side near the radio controls) and then the radio and siren. It also comes with a mobile phone charger that is labeled as a Nokia adapter. Packaging claims they will send you a free one if you log in to their website.

Hopefully we'll never have to use them, but it's nice to know they're there.

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The light is decent for the price. But I bought this model to get its cell phone charging cabability also (which they say is free). However, to my surprise, you have to go online to order the 'exact' cell phone adapter (shipping and handling NOT included) for your EXACT cell phone model. And despite my having a common Nokia cell phone, none of their listed adapters would work. They said that they would do me the favor of letting me know (via email) if they ever come out with an adapter to fit my VERY COMMON Nokia cell phone. If I knew it was going to be this much trouble, I would have gotten a different crank LED lantern for the same price, but with better lighting capability.

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Pros:

-Multiple options for power source (crank, 3 AAA batteries, etc.)

-Multiple functions (lantern, night light, radio, etc.)

Cons:

-Light isn't very bright.

-Although it has a lot of functions, they don't work great.

-Crank power diminished quickly.

I was really excited to receive this lantern, I thought the multiple functions would be really useful, but overall I didn't find this lantern to be all that great.

I was definitely disappointed with how bright this lantern got.

After cranking it for a few minutes, it would only stay reasonably bright for about a minute, and then it would dim a little.

We ended up using 3 AAA batteries as our power source so the light would remain at it's brightest.

But even at it's brightest, it's not a very good light source.

According to the manufacturer's web site, when the night light is in use it emits an ultrasonic frequency to repel mosquitoes. Not really sure if it repels the mosquitoes, but the night light feature was probably the best thing about this lantern.

The 2nd feature we used the most other than the night light was connecting our mp3 player to it to listen to music through its speakers. The sound quality isn't amazing, but more comfortable than using headphones.

For the price, it was worth a try.

But we're still going to look around for something better for future camping trips.