Thursday, February 24, 2011

Portable Power


I admit it. I travel with a lot of gadgets on a daily basis, but it's even worse when I'm jetting off somewhere. It doesn't matter if it's business or pleasure, in addition to my phone and Kindle, I usually have my Nintendo DS stashed away, and my laptop is always near at hand. But the catch is that while I usually try to make sure everything is charged before I leave to go anywhere, sometimes I forget, or sometimes it's a long enough trip with no plug-in access that I find myself with tech that's starting to die.

For my phone and my Kindle, in particular, this has been a problem. On the phone, when I'm traveling it gets constant use, from checking emails to making calls to checking my schedule and confirmation numbers. My battery is pretty good and lasts all day with normal use. When traveling, however, I'm lucky to still be on and in use by the end of the work day. For the Kindle, it's usually more that I forget to plug it in, or thing it has more charge than it does. The worst was getting on a 12-hour international flight, pulling out the Kindle, and discovering it was completely dead.

However, some of my worries about power on the go are gone now. At a recent trade show, I came across a small company called Chargeology selling portable power packs. I admit, I walked by the booth a few times, tried plugging in my phone to see it if would actually work, and looked for reasons to walk by just one more time. Finally, on the last day of the show, I decided the $100 was an investment I really needed to make.

I haven't regretted it since.

The power packs come in two sizes. The small one is good for pretty much everything except laptops. The larger one will charge laptops as well. Since the bulk of what I wanted to plug in were small electronics like my phone, and I wanted to be able to carry it with me easily, I decided on the smaller version, although at some point I would like to get the bigger one to keep in with my travel gear for use mainly on long flights.

The small charger is about the size of a deck of cards, maybe slightly larger. It weighs about the same as my phone, and it came in a pouch for storage. It also came with a charging cable for the device, and a 10-in-one cable for plugging devices into it. The 10-in-one actually has plugs for pretty much all my gadgets except my DS, which is sad, but they had told me when I bought it that they actually do sell a 12-in-one that has the correct connection for a DS, but they were sold out of them at the show. It's a minor issue, but I'll probably eventually see about getting the 12-in-one. The cable itself is short, which is good since the biggest use for it is to plug in the phone while you're still using it. I just set my phone on top while it's charging and continue to use it as normal.

The unit has one input port for charging itself, and two USB ports for plugging in and charging devices. This makes it nice, since even if you don't want to use the cable it comes with, or you have a device that uses a different type of connection, as long as it's USB you're good to go. I also like that it has two ports, so you can have multiple things plugged in at the same time, such as my phone and Kindle.

It takes roughly 8 hours to go from completely dead to a full charge on the power pack itself. I've never run completely out of power on the thing, however, so I'll usually plug it in to top it off before a trip, which varies based on how much I used it since the last charge. The company says it will last a few days as the primary power source for a device, and I believe them. From what I've seen, I could probably run my phone off of it for close to a week without any issues. I have noticed, though, that it doesn't give as much power as you could get plugged into a standard type of charging port. Unless the phone is off, I find it tends to hold my current charge steady rather than refill it. I would like to see even a slow increase in the phone's charge over time, but it's a minor issue, since I use it as emergency power when something dies rather than a primary charging source.

All in all, this little device has become something I don't leave home without. There's a great deal of peace of mind knowing I won't be stranded somewhere with a dead cell phone, or on another long flight with no Kindle, ever again. It lets me work and play how I want, without constantly having to adjust my behaviors for a battery. If you do any kind of traveling, and you carry any kind of gadgets, this is an investment you need to make.

No comments:

Post a Comment