The 30-pin can either run off the Apple device’s battery, or off an included USB to mini USB cable, or to an included USB wall plug.
The 30-pin has a built in rechargeable battery and is recharged via USB. You can run it while it’s charging. The universal has a power adapter.
@lamedog, that’s interesting that the microwave apparently killed these light/speakers. Microwave ovens do stomp on the 2.4gHz band but normally wouldn’t actually kill a device. You might want to have that microwave oven checked out and hopefully you’re finished having kids. 
We’ve also found that mobile devices with marginal wifi cards/chips/antennae freak out if we use them anywhere near the microwave when it is on. But none of them has died.
This is a good reason to have a dual band wifi router and corresponding mobile devices when possible. Lots of stuff competes in that 2.4 gHz band.
Just as a friendly FYI, it is spelt ‘whoa’… (I couldn’t remember how to spell it myself a couple of weeks ago, and had to look it up.)
Just got mine. Sound is decent but very high pitched sound coming from the base and plug. Must be bad capacitors. Trying to return.
I bought two. One ALREADY died. No light, no sound
Wanted to share this to possibly save others a lot of frustration. When I first bought this lite it worked great. Shortly after that I did an update on my computer and my speaker stopped working. I thought that I had done something to it because at the same time I moved the light from one light to another. I emailed Woot and Sylvania about replacing it since it stopped working. The light worked just no sound. I was really frustrated with it and was about to give up on it. I did a search about unrecognized device on windows 7 and found this Microsoft Easy Fix solutions have been discontinued - Microsoft Support I ran this fix from Microsoft and it started working again. If you have an issue with your speaker not working on windows 7 run this fixit… Well back to Pandora to listen to my music. Also ran a sfc /scannow from the cmd.exe as admin.