Poundland Technology Special | Ashens

cheapo the technology you can buy these days for just one pound is absolutely amazing other than always amazing in a good way as we will get on to anyway yes I've been round pound world and pound land and come up with various technological items and the very first one solves a massive problem in our lives what if you want to watch a film or something on your phone in a hotel room but the screen just isn't big enough well fear not friends our friends at signal X have our backs with the phone screen magnifier compatible with most phones every phone of the world except yours for optimum viewing folds away and portable are together at last three times magnification reduced reduces eye fatigue yeah I've seen one of these in operation I really don't think they do reduce eye fatigue we'll get onto that I like the compatibility chart phones so what does that work with phones is it going to work with my cell phones it's just like being on a tech support line right um same again on the back try me we'll refund a replace if you are not happy with our quality hmm hmm right let's see what it's like then to come out the box that's a bad start here we go so you're looking at a little plastic device to hold your phone up here's something to actually hold up the screen there and indeed it's just like a big crazy Fresnel lens with enough graduations to frankly pull your retinas out of course solid in its way reminds me a bit of these cyber FX helmets that I reviewed many many millenniums ago so I suspect that this isn't actually going to be that impressive right here is a photo but I took in Hong Kong of a statue holding a conch shell it looks like this normally there it is and now we'll put it on here and yeah um so hands up who likes distortion and really over-the-top light rays then well looking at it with the naked eye it's just as bad actually it's completely distorts the picture to a quite frightening extent actually you can see it sort of walk and shimmering away they're like some sort of scrying mirror from a witch's teat and yeah it's absolute garbage I mean it frankly blatantly does not mean I suppose technically it's a magnifier three times yes I'll give them that I'll give them that but it makes it look like such utter utter ass wash that nobody in their right mind would actually use it not fit for purpose is what we can say in bloody reduces eye fatigue is going to give you eye fatigue if you've never had I fatigue before I fatigue at you ha right rough start but don't worry we'll now go into something really quality what's that one thing from pound shops that are always great that's right headphones oh wait the other one I thought I'd try a pair of headphones they sell loads of different ones these days and I thought I'd try these sports ones little hooks to go around your ears to something falling out incidentally I tested them and put them on the table or when I came back - and they tie themselves of the most amazing knot in history I know headphones have a sort of thing about doing this but I know if it was a way they were packaged or something it's going to take that the rest of my life in order to get through that and but I probably won't bother because as you would expect from single export headphones year they ain't very bloody good avoid listening to your earphones at live volumes as this can damage your hearing well don't worry I don't even actually get these up of that high they're just that kind of well hearing loss simulator it just kind of has a very narrow bone frequencies quite low there's no so treble there's no real bass to speak of it's just a sort of muddy vague description of what it is you're supposed to be listening to it's been like you've been next to an explosion and it's damaged your hearing and then you've stuck your head in some mud and then somebody has stuck as speaking into the mud next to you that's what it sounds like you would get better sound reproduction or get your child to hum the tune you want to listen to back to you basically cheap headphones don't do it to yourselves even in an emergency they will not do you well but fear not there are more impressive things for your one shiny pound how about for instance an entire stereo headset with microphone from signalex again these are open signal X as well one point three meter approximately stereo headset microphone ideal for internet calls through an out millimeter jack fantastic compatible mp3 players phones sound systems game consoles tablets cats dogs monkeys everything you want and same precautions as the other one and it is exactly like one of those headsets you know you'd wear in a call center if you had a job that made you want to kill yourself there the first problem of this is they're not recoverable to wear due to the fact is very very flimsy plastic it doesn't really fit over your head very well and keeps moving up into sort of one side of your ear so that was quite annoying second problem it's not got a 3.5 millimeter jack it's got two one for headphones obviously and one for microphone meaning you can't use it with a phone or tablet or anything without adapter so well done well done and won't equality like well the headphones actually slightly better than these unbelievably and they have a better sort of range of frequencies that you can hear with your ears so that's nice however the headset well it sounds like this thank you for calling the ashens channel we are experiencing a high volume of calls at the moment but a member of staff will be with you as soon as possible so yeah that's a bit of a shame I suppose a tiny little microphone with headphones for a pound isn't going to cut it but I tell you what for merely one more pound you can get a far more impressive looking thing done from connect it our first non signal X item of the day dynamic microphone with 6.3 millimeter connector 3 millimeter detachable cable suitable for use with karaoke at concerts and PA systems pas of course standing for Paul's arse don't shove it up there though it doesn't like it and the reverse specifications dynamic microphone cardioid directional sensitivity most physics desk bell rings arranged very high impedance 600 ohms it's got all your favorite numbers and this product is manufactured to the highest standards mm-hmm right so what's it like then well you get your cable which quite annoyingly was one of these ones with a really old-fashioned a fat jack in it so I had to stick find out one of those adapters I haven't used since like 1987 so thanks for making me look that up the other end standard sort of connector very plasticy very different metal not at all but does this job and here is the microphone my goodness connect it it can be both off and on which is quite pleasing and it looks like a sort of decent looking bike isn't it I mean you know if you saw that you could use it as a prop if you're making a film and didn't want to risk a real microphone something but it does indeed act as a mic but what is the quality like well it sounds like this you're listening to the ashens channel on YouTube coming up next Bachman Turner overdrive and you ain't seen nothing yet yep bloody awful and I suppose as you would expect is an impressive looking thing although it doesn't feel that impressive it's just all very plastic yellow it's pretty solid I suppose but yeah sound quality is awful but they yet have one chance to redeem themselves do the shops of pound 4 there is yet another mic on their shelves computer microphone from electro tech exactly when those things used to see on the shelves of computer shops accept cheaper for internet gaming Skype and FaceTime all your favorites and that's it on the back so the device itself is indeed just a little microphone on a stick got an on-off switch was exciting wasn't it and as you'd expect just has a standard 3.5 millimeter jack it doesn't I'm going to be honest this looks the cheapest out of the whole lot I mean it's not been put together properly and you can see this little gap in the plastic there it is just a really horrible cheap plastic thing but what does it sound like then you're listening to the electro tech one pound computer microphone on the Ashland's channel coming up next a boring man who is in the 70s group talks about records you've never heard of but bloody hell is it just me or does that actually sound pretty good I've heard worse audio quality on many YouTube videos I mean they obviously they spent all their money on the actual circuitry and not on the awful cheap case but genuinely impressed by that if you are after a microphone of some type and you just want to use it very cheaply in cleanly setup a decent area stand a decent distance from it and I tell you what that's not gonna sound too bad very impressed for a pound well done now what do we do about the problem of having too many USB devices but not enough USB ports could have gotten those laptops like two ports know something well a new superhero has arrived he's kind of a hero we didn't want need or deserve he is kin oaken's USB hub bot four USB 2.0 high-speed ports Windows and Mac compatible 450 millimeter link creative design you ain't [ __ ] me is like little flat man marvelous and work to the usb compliant device as well we've kind of guessed that by the way it's a USB hub so ya don't see his a smiling face there hello world I am hub but I will eat your faces no that's enough of that enough of that keep it nice and yeah it's basically a bleed that goes into four separate USB ports and yes it looks like a jolly little fella there he is ha ha ha bored of him now so yeah basically plug it in the light lights up you'd probably guess that bit and then you can plug your USB device in it is not powered so you're not going to be able to plug that many things in but I tell you what I did get away with plugging in four different USB pen drives at once and it could read more fine to could the computer so that was quite impressive less impressive was this is actually the second one I bought the first one didn't work at all literally it just wouldn't give any sort of pass through you know none of the port's worked at all so you've got 50% chance of getting a weird old man that sort of works but going to be honest if you're going to go for USB hub do always go for a powered because they're going to be much more reliable USB power eh well that's a segue to the portable charger power bank these things have been around pound world for some time two hours available charging time two whole hours madness 1200 micro amp hours one amp was that milliamp hours yes that's milli micro is the greatest amusement fool for use of the various devices which use USB cables yep it's one of those little batteries you put in your pocket for when you're on a train or something in the plug sockets don't work because for some reason they never seem to on trains suitable for most mobile phones ecigs tablet PCs or the digital pro settle neesee mmm he seeks draw a lot of power down there that seems dangerous to me there we are charging time to hours using cycle filter 3 and 50 battery type lithium polymer and it comes in various colors six and they're all vibrant they can accept black which isn't a particularly vibrant it but let's not get into that colors and actually why isn't very would you describe white is vibrant i means bright isn't it you see those seem quite vibrant those ones in the end not so much anyway i'm thinking too much about colors so yes the problem here is i could plug it in test it but something like this there's a lot to go wrong I mean lithium cells can literally combust you know it's all over the news when it happens but it does indeed happen um if only there was somebody on YouTube I could give this to here was some sort of electrical engineer with an interesting tat to tell us where it's safe or not but sadly no such person exists except big Clive well thank you mister ashens I have now done some tests on these pound world power banks and a vest gives them a little bit and there's two different versions now all the modern ones that all the pound and pound world should to see that I visited recently have been selling a version in a packet like this and not sure if we use the same packaging for the older ones because it is a almost identical-looking it's a very standard case however there is a difference if you look at the back of the case there is a panel that clips and cover all the electronics inside and in the order one that panel is absolutely flush it's flat down with the plastic casing in the modern ones and to be honest the better ones that sticks up just a tiny little bit there's a rear edge that sticks up there and that's how you can partially identify them the main differences are that the older version was unreliable I bought two of them one was dead and arrival the other died shortly thereafter and they also had the interesting feature that the lithium cell which is an 18 650 which means 18 millimeters diameter by six to 5.0 millimeters long they had the battery the lithium cell in us of standard sort of battery holder inside who dies with the motor months these newer ones it's actually soldered in with these strips and sort of connections which is better in a way the other ones maybe had the advantage you could pop open you could take the cell out but I wouldn't recommend use it in any high drain application like a vaping device because these are just not rated for that at all in fact I think some of them are actually pushed for this application however moving on to the new ones the good ones these ones caught a 1200 milliamp hour capacity and that basically indicates the capacity of the cell inside you won't get that out the 5 volt port because there's a loss in the conversion from the low voltage to the higher voltage however you're not going to get anywhere remotely near that because this one tested out at just 995 milliamp hour which is you know it's not far off 1200 milliamp but our but this one tested it only 710 million power capacity which is you know well short that's just basically well about two-thirds at best of the capacity quoted however moving on the chip on this one unlike the crappy ones before which had an on and on let's try that again an anonymous chip which was very unreliable these ones had a chip that is made by super chip and it's called an FM 9 8 3 3 e and it's a really good said it it's designed specifically for this task and its features are it will it's got one feature above standard GP Chinese units that you may get off eBay in that when the battery runs flat this actually warns you that it's running flat the when you plug a load in or let me plug a load in and show you when you plug a load in a blue LED will aid to sure that it's discharging and when the battery starts to run flat that will start flashing before it cuts out and when it does cut out it really does cut out it physically turns the connection to the the cell off and this is good because these are themselves are very very fussy about the voltages they're discharged to uncharged it if you exceed the ratings in other direction they will be damaged and the very least they just won't take a proper charge again very worse they might go thermal nuclear and you've heard these stories about lithium batteries exploding you know I'm not going to say that these ones alight to do that or the anonymous ones the non branded ones are somewhat more suspect than the better-quality ones however on that subject the there seems to be a misconception that the reason lithium batteries do go nuclear when they feel they really explode violently some people seem to think that that's because they contain lithium in reality the rechargeable version of the lithium cells contains very little with him it's just lithium salts and it's fairly based chemicals that it's in but where it does have problems is that if these cells do feel and they can feel they tend to dissipate all their energy at once and to be honest it's not so much of a hazard with these ones I think they've got a fairly high internal resistance and they've got a fairly low capacity so they're not as critical as some of the really big cells but what actually happens when the feel is that the they tend to get a short-circuit in the side or they tend to get shorted in the output and it results them passing an awful lot of power and the heat up and then that leads to internal failure and it basically all the energy in the battery gets discharged in a very short length of time and it results in a lot of heat and as unfortunately the liquid that couples the electrodes in here is combustible that results in venting of that combustible liquid which may burst into flames if it goes above its flashpoint and that's where all these exploding batteries sort of stories come from however the battery has about the best protection we could have here with this chip because the cheaper Chinese ones they don't disconnect the battery completely and there is a possibility if you plug in certain loads even when the battery's flat even though this unit stops boosting up to 5 volts it can still trickle current through and it can over discharge the cell that doesn't happen this when it has full protection when it reaches and I tested this when it reaches approximately two point nine volts which is ideal it cuts off completely and when you're charging it you shouldn't exceed in this particular type of cell 4.2 volts and this one went up to four point one name and then cut off precisely very good the crescent current which is the Mount Kurama on from the battery when the unit isn't standby is extremely low the datasheet because I found the datasheet it wasn't Chinese but a nice to glean the information I needed it stage 20 micro amps and I tested it and that certainly does tally up said Clive keeping the metal clip away from this bureau circuit board so it's a very impressive trip that's actually the best thing about these packs is this little circuit board here it's also rated to put out five volts at one amp but that depends on if they've skipped on the little inductor here certainly I did test it and at about eight or nine hundred milliamps the voltage only dropped from 5 volts to about four point seven volts and that's very good so it is holding that but as with all these things I prefer not to run them at the fill capacity because they will get warm in the process other technical characteristics worth mentioning when you plug it in to charge it charges at about six hundred milliamps which is a good typical charging current that's fine so I'm in synopsis these things don't have enough energy density in the cell to make a huge significant impact in something like a iPad or a really large screen Android phone but they're ideal for other applications like charging small sat-nav units charging things like a small cameras and stuff like that or even just powering things like say for instance little USB powered lights like this one from Ikea which if you plug it in should actually run for a good long length of time one thing worth mentioning if you do plug in an item that are very high that tries to draw far too much current then these units will go into a shutdown mode they'll basically the blue light will lay briefly then go out and it'll stay out until it's had a short time to reset and when you plug a load back in it work again so in general if you're technically savvy then you would probably want one of these just for these little circuit boards because they're actually very good much better than many of the eBay little mini versions of this but for general use I'd say for light duty applications these are powerful acceptable when you consider that this is being sold by pone world for 1 pound it's kind of ridiculous because its quality is way above that so I'm one I don't even know why they end up stocking something that seems so relatively good and the only thing that comes to mind is this a relatively low capacity of the cells versus what was stated there other than that this newer version seems actually very respectable indeed thank you very much Clive do go and subscribe to his channel he has lots of interesting videos we take stuff apart talks about them I like that kind of thing so yes ah what can we come away with from this well there's some items for a pound that kind of work and others that don't see it's that kind of hard-hitting journalism which you only get on YouTube tell you what let's look at another couple of arms I've got knocking around there's an optical mouse sold by signal Hicks absolutely USB optical mouse and it feels cheap as heck as you would imagine very plastic in light but it's got your scroll wheel it's probably real button even but if the buttons work and once it's slightly too small as well as you like it awkward it works fine um it's not particularly nice thing to use but if you just want to test something or you're stuck somewhere and don't know your trackpad stop working on your laptop you can just nip off to pound land buy one of these a little work fine for a pound amazing also very good for a pound these signal ex sync and charge cables for the newer iPhones or that lightning connector thing I've had on these over a year and it is worked perfectly and never damaged where is the [ __ ] ones that Apple is the insultingly [ __ ] bloody cables that Apple always give you how expensive are your devices you bastards give us decent cables don't last five bloody minutes do they and slightly tug on them and they're ruined this thing has lasted over a year the only thing is the connector on it only connects in one way round whereas lightning should be both but only works one or on the one I've been using anyway also at nowadays improved quality and I don't know what that means because it doesn't you said online I can't remember but this woman is fascinated by the concept of phones I reckon it's like the beginning of scream somebody's just calling up to threaten her life and she's like oh my god but what about my cool hair I just had done either that or she's terrified of the thing that punched a hole in the card it might be going for a head next who knows also they do really brightly colored ugly ones I presume these were I've never tried them but once they do look like they've escaped from a pimps handbag on the plus side if you do have it in a bag traveling you always find it really easily when you wrong you

Channel: ashens

Views: 1,557,435

Rating: 4.8689351 out of 5

Keywords: poundland, special, ashens, review, funny, big clive, signalex, poundworld, usb hub, usb man, usb bot, battery, screen magnifier, headphones, earphones, microphone, microphones

Id: uf3Cb3UB5hc

Length: 22min 35sec (1355 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 26 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/Quinny898]

Ashens and Big Clive in one video

BEST^DAYEVER

[u/DrFegelein]

PHONES

[u/ndizzIe]

USB CABELS

[u/DrDagless]

The bald heads and magnificent beards of Big Clive and Mentski in the same video? Blimey. I hope if they ever meet they don't merge into a blob of organic matter like that poor bastard in Timecop.

Anyway; the quality of that microphone is truly astonishing! I'm genuinely tempted to pick one up.

[u/JDGumby]

Actually, that microphone @5:25 sounds loads better than the $10 store-brand standing mic I had to get from Wal-Mart to use 'til I could scrape together $60 for a new headset last year...

edit: ditto for the mic @8:05.

[u/bean9914]

Ok, where on earth did the "Electrotec" microphone come from? I've looked all over eBay, Amazon and the like but I haven't found anything like it.

I'd actually like one to dismantle and use the actual mic bit for video, since I can't see anything of comparable quality below £50.

The brand name doesn't seem to exist anywhere else, either...

edit: Except, oddly, I found a USB keyboard vacuum cleaner thingy on Ebay branded with "Electrotec"

[u/tgcp]

Is there a reason the second microphone audio only played in the left channel?

Fault of the microphone or the editor?

[u/subject_usrname_here]

That 3rd mic though, dammit, it sounds so good for a pirce. I want it, but I live outside of UK. Maybe aliexpress is selling them, if someone find it there please let me know.

[u/Slowrider8]

Oh man I was thinking of Big Clive the second he pulled out that battery bank, can't believe he actually showed up right after!