An interesting portable USB hub

I've been searching for a USB 2.0 hub which meets certain criteria. It needs to be small (it's meant for my PowerBook and must travel well), it had to provide bus power for devices which require it and it absolutely could not have a wall wart. I hate wall warts with a passion, life would be a heck of a lot easier if vendors would separate the transformer and plug with 10 cents of cord.

After having lunch with a friend today, I decided to drop by Best Buy to see what options they had (I was interested in looking at the Targus portable hubs). What I found, and wound up purchasing is the CyberPower CP-H420MP, a USB 2.0 Mobile Battery Powered Hub. This fascinating little hub (about 10% larger than a credit card) uses four rechargeable AAA batteries to provide bus power for USB devices which need it.

I've been playing with it for the last few hours, plugging things in almost randomly (I've got a lot of USB crap as it turns out) and pulling them back out.

It might have some problems, but I don't have anything to compare it to. I had some glitches when putting in new devices, with my sound occasionally moving back to the internal sound system from my USB headphones. Steady state (whatever that might mean on a bus), it seems to work quite well. I've used a mixture of USB 1.1 and 2.0 devices including a USB 1.1 hard drive (which needs bus power) and it seemed to work quite well. The most important items all seem to work well together: EyeTV (1.1), Headphones and mic (1.1) and the SanDisk ImageMate (2.0) as long as I don't screw around too much.

The jury is certainly still out, and the EyeTV seems to be the most sensitive to the hub (it's just goes dumb at times), so I may try moving things around a bit more. I'll update after I get a bit more experience.