Dual Wii Remote Charging Station (Wii)

This is a great piece of kit, it looks nice, fits well on my TV, and despite what some people say, I find the nunchuk holders very useful. It charges quickly, and the battery life is very satisfactory.

However, there is one problem. The battery packs fit in very tightly, and i mean very. They go in ok, but there is a little gap (between the pack, and the wiimote), where they are pushing out. Also, if you try to take the packs out, beware. I took my pack out, and it took a worrying amount of force. The second time i took it out, on the battery contacts broke off, and now it is useless.

Overall, great product, just don't take the battery pack out, unless you really have to (if you need to sync it, just press 1 and 2 at the same time).

Sam

This charging solution for the Wii Remote is very well thought out. In the package contents you're presented with a charging station (which holds two Wii Remotes and two nunchucks), a pass-through power lead, and two rechargeable battery packs.

Unlike what previous reviews may say (from people that haven't even received the product yet), the charging lead is NOT a USB lead that attaches to the back of your Wii. This would be a bad idea as you'd need your Wii switched on to get power from the USB port, and most people want to switch the Wii consoles off when they're not using them. What you ACTUALLY get is mains power lead pass-through connector. You unplug the mains lead from your Wii and plug it into the power adaptor from the Power Station. The power adaptor is a pass-through type, so you then plug that into the mains socket on the back of your Wii. The only downside to this is that you end up with a longer rigid plug sticking out of the back of your Wii, which may cause a problem if space is tight at the rear of your console.

After plugging in the Power Station to the mains as above, you then remove the battery cover and the batteries from your two Wii Remotes, and replace it with the battery pack from the Power Station. What these power packs are is essentially a normal Wii Remote battery cover, with two AA sized NiMH batteries attached to the back, and two small metal charging connector plates on the rear which make contact with the charging pins in the main base station. The whole setup reminds me of typical cordless telephone charging stations. One thing I did notice, was that the battery packs need a very hard squeeze to make them click home into the Wii Remotes, but once there they stay in place.

You can now place the two Wii Remotes into the main base station and they will begin to charge. You do not need you console switched on to do this as it takes power from the mains lead before it gets to your console. The base station has two indicator lights, one for each remote. Red means it's charging, green means it's charged. A full charge (according to the instructions) takes 5 hours. As far as I can tell, a full charge lasts more than a whole day of use, so overnight charging should be fine to ensure you never need normal batteries again. My battery packs were almost fully charged when they arrived, and only needed 30 minutes of charging for the indicators to go green.

If you wish, you can also extend the nunchuck holding arms on either side of the main base unit. I wasn't that impressed with this as it seems to be very hit and miss getting the nunchuck into a position where it seems to fit snugly. I resorted to pushing the holding arms back in to the base unit to grip the nunchucks and it then seemed to be fine.

Another minor downside is that you can't access the Sync button on the inside of the battery compartment of the Wii Remotes with these battery packs in place. As the cover and battery pack is one solid unit, removing the battery cover pulls the battery pack out too. So, if you ever need to re-sync the remote you must do so with normal batteries. Once it's synced you can go back to the battery packs of course.

Like all NiMH batteries, they'll eventually stop holding their charge as well as they used to. But when this happens I'll be buying another Power Station for sure. It may be possible to get just the battery packs of course - let's wait and see if the manufacturer will sell them separately.

Would I recommend this? Yes - to all Wii users. I'd consider it one of the essential things to have, and will probably pay for itself in a few months.

This is a great Gadget and it does exactly what is says on the box, it charges the wii remotes and gives and good place to keep the nunchucks. But when I opened the box i didn't see a bit to plug in to the usb. So I looked at the instructions and found out it acctually plugs in the the bit in the back on the wii where you plug in power. And the you plug the power cable into the back of the cable to make the wii work. So it will charge the Wii remotes a lot fast then it would if it was pluged into the USB. :)