This year in the UK we've been overwhelmed with the big orange in the sky. Whilst we were slaving away writing product reviews in this scorching heat, a cooling product called the Breeze USB Fan dropped into the studio from the folks at Arctic. We've never reviewed such a category previously but we were eager to get a refreshing breeze going in the studio.

Design

The Arctic Breeze has a bigger brother known as the Arctic Breeze Pro, which differentiates itself with a four port USB hub and an adjustable speed control. The Breeze Mobile USB Fan is roughly $10 cheaper over the Pro unit at $7.99 within the USA. Within the UK it's £5.60.

The fan is compact and lightweight, leaving a minute footprint. The fan is powered via a single USB 2.0 port and works particularly well with notebook computers, however the Apple wired keyboards with a USB 2.0 port either side of them will also power the fan, so this provides a viable option to use the Arctic Breeze with a desktop computer too.

Performance

The 92mm fan spins at 1700 RPM and delivers a cool and gentle breeze as the product name would suggest. It's not going to blow your clothes off but on extremely hot days we found this greatly beneficial in taking the edge off the heat. The degree of noise the fan makes whilst it's spinning is exceptionally low level, so it doesn't disturb. And it doesn't mind being left on for hours on end, we left it on for a solid four hours with no problems.

It's made even more useful because of its adjustable gooseneck, which allows the passage of wind to be directed to where you want it to flow. This also helped it to serve as a cooling appliance for our notebooks by tilting the fan towards them whilst plugged in; it works well.

Overall

The Arctic Breeze Mobile USB Fan serves as a compact, quiet, refreshing and  inexpensive method of cooling while you're on your notebook or even possibly on a desktop setup.