Like an overstuffed Swiss Army knife, the Eton Raptor is positively bursting with survival-minded tech, making it an essential gadget for trips into the backwoods, or even just a camp out in the backyard.
Just get a load of all the save-your-ass features that come built in: a compass, an altimeter, a barometer and thermometer, a chronograph with an alarm clock, a speaker fed by either a multiband radio (AM, FM, shortwave, NOAA weather alert) or an audio line input, and an LED flashlight. There's even a bottle opener for crackin' your brewskis. Finally – and this is key – it's all powered by a 1800-mAh lithium ion battery that recharges using the built-in monocrystal solar panel, and you can transfer that charge to a phone or any other gadget that accepts a USB cable.
With the sheer multitude of functions packed into this 11-ounce, 8-inch-long hunk of plastic and rubber, you would think it was one of those gizmos hawked on late night TV infomercials. "It slices, it dices! It does everything – and more!"
Getting all these functions to work takes a little bit more brain power than mastering a SaladShooter or a Flowbee, however. There are nine buttons on the face, and these buttons are used to access every task. And unfortunately, there's little about the Raptor's button array that's particularly intuitive. The 12-page user manual isn't much of a help.
The power button is only for turning on the radio. The instructions don't tell you that, and it took me about 20 minutes of trial and error to figure that out. It doesn't help that the rest of the buttons are terribly named. "Volume –" and "Volume +" are no-brainers, but what's the difference between "M" and "MEM"? There's a complicated button-pressing pattern involved when you want to access certain functions, and you have to press everything in the right order or else you end up somewhere else, at which point you're forced to start again.
