There are battery chargers…and then there are battery chargers. Know what we mean? Ho-hum products just sit there and, like charge your batteries. Sure they can do it faster or slower, but at the end of the day all you’re going to get is a cell with some juice in it. But real power users (!) need more than that, much more.

The SkyRC NC2500 Battery Charger & Analyzer definitely charges batteries. Oh yes. It comes with eight compartments to do that stuff, four for AA and another four for AAA, all of which can be used simultaneously. Battery heaven. But where the product really shines is in the programmable functions, which you set using the integrated LCD.

For starters you can set the thing to do a full discharge of a battery to restore its capacity, and you can also do a ‘refresh & analyze’, which can tell you why a battery is not performing as well as expected. The Break-In mode forces a charge-discharge-charge cycle cycle which forces a full charge into new batteries and also helps restore cells which have been stored for more than 3 months (by charging at a very low rate).

The charger is so intelligent it comes with its own app, which you can use to remotely analyze your batteries on your phone via Bluetooth, as well as view things like battery temp, internal resistance and all sorts of loverly geeky stuff. Just think how you can impress your friends with your new found battery genius.

The unit can additionally detect damaged batteries and halt the charge cycle before things get out of hand, and there’s a mode called Cycle, which performs a charge/discharge cycle up to 12 times to try and remove memory effect from NiCd cells. Basically this thing does the works. Plus Bluetooth. Mind boggling! Priced at a power packed $105.00.