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HooToo TripMate Elite – a very cool tool for travelers to Internet hostile hotels [Review]

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OK, seriously, what is the matter with hotels? Why on earth do they insist on making you jump through hoops and pay for Internet connections, don’t they realise it’s more important than clean towels most of the time. Well almost. Anyway, if you’re a traveler, we’ve found a product which should hopefully make your life a lot easier all round.

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The HooToo TripMate Elite is a very cool 4 in 1 travel accessory which combines a great set of features in one pocket friendly form factor. For one thing it comes with an integrated 6000mAh battery and two USB ports, which can charge up smartphones or tablets wherever you happen to be. But that’s not all, oh no sirree!

First impressions
The product comes in a nice looking box, along with a micro USB charge cable for recharging the internal battery, and a nicely produced user manual. The manual is actually pretty essential because it contains information on how to connect, which we’ll come to in a minute. The unit itself is your typical plastic affair, but it seems pretty robust, and while it won’t win any design contests, it’s small enough to be discreet when it counts. Check out our video below to see how it works.

In use
Apart from the internal battery, the unit also sports a WiFi module, which means that you can use it as a WiFi hotspot when you’re faced with a hotel which has no facilities to cope with normal WiFi. Just plug in an Ethernet cable, and then download and install the free TripMate app to the devices you want to connect up. Then you’ll have access to the Internet as a hotspot, which multiple people can do too.

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As well as offering you that functionality, the unit also acts as a primary wall charger, so you can plug it directly into a power socket, bypass the internal battery altogether, and charge up to two items at once from the twin USB sockets. One of the sockets is 2.1 amp, which means it will handle tablet computers nicely.

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The final part of the 4 in 1 is the ‘personal cloud’ as they call it. Just plug in an external drive into a USB slot and you’ll be able to share all the data on there with anyone who’s connected to the unit. Great for watching your own movies, or sharing business stuff in a room full of people with devices (what sad parties you have).

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Conclusion
There are plenty of products around which can do what this one can do, but none of them that we know of can do it all from the one small box. Basically for the price of a single portable battery block, you’re getting a whole load of functionality thrown in for free, and it’s all good stuff, exactly what you’d need on a business trip or vacation. In fact the only thing that’s not on-board is any internal memory, but that’s not really a big deal when you can easily use a microSD card and USB adapter to make your own external storage solution. Nice one all round. Recommended.

Price
$46.99

editorschoice4

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