Four Cool Gadgets To Extend Your Tablet’s Battery Life
As tablets and smartphones gain more features and become almost necessary in day-to-day life, they also begin to consume more power and we’re less able to tolerate a dead battery on one of our devices.
Enter the mobile battery pack, which can extend your device’s battery life by several full charges or several hours, depending on the energy demands of different smartphones or tablets by manufacturers like Lenovo, Samsung, Apple, or Google. Here are four battery packs that could save you from a flat battery while you’re on the move:
Mophie Juice Pack Powerstation Duo
The Mophie Juice Pack Powerstation Duo is a sleek rectangle that can handle two devices simultaneously, including the most power-hungry tablets, with its 6,000mAh battery. Connect the devices through one of the two USB ports and you’re off and away.
As Pocket Lint’s review notes, the Juice Pack Powerstation Duo can charge most smartphones three times over, from a flat battery. For tablets like the iPad or iPad 2, it’s able to charge them up from flat too. But latest iPads require more juice, so the Juice Pack Powerstation Duo can’t charge it up completely, but can add valuable minutes to the battery life.
As Pocket Lint notes, popular Android tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab can achieve a full charge with the Juice Pack Powerstation Duo without a problem. PC Mag’s review notes that Mophie’s charger is “undoubtedly one of the nicer looking and feeling portable batteries out there”.
Iogear GearPower Mobile Power Station
Iogear’s GearPower Mobile Power Station is positioned as a solid value buy for users who need a high-capacity mobile battery. It packs a 6,600mAh battery that can handle smartphones and even the most demanding tablets.
The Iogear GearPower Mobile Power Station comes with two USB ports for simultaneous charging of two devices. According to PC Mag’s tests, the battery pack added nearly 21 hours to the battery life of the iPhone 4S and nearly six hours of life to an iPad 2.
Iogear’s GearPower Mobile Power Station is a somewhat bulky, though powerful and well-priced, addition to the mobile battery market. It measures 4.4 by 3.5 inches and its 0.6 inches thick. It weighs 12 ounces — which is nearly three times heavier than comparable devices like the Sanyo eneloop Mobile Booster. However, as the Android and Me blog points out, it gets the job done without a fuss every time.
Sanyo eneloop Mobile Booster
Sanyo’s eneloop Mobile Booster sports a compact form-factor, a sleek and attractive all-white design, and the imprimatur of Japanese maker Sanyo’s brand of rechargeable battery technology. But is such a small device capable of delivering enough charge to tablets and smartphones?
As PC Mag’s review noted, the Sanyo eneloop Mobile Booster certainly strikes the right balance among looks, portability and functionality. That’s why the magazine bestowed its Editor’s Choice Award on the device. But it can’t reliably charge certain power-hungry smartphones and tablets, like the HTC Thunderbolt or the HTC Evo. However, it did add more than five hours of video playback to an iPad 1 on a single full charge.
Sanyo’s eneloop Mobile Booster also sports a highly intuitive user interface, consisting of just one blue LED and one button. To start charging a device, just connect it to the Mobile Booster and hit the button. The blue LED will glow, and it starts delivering charge to smartphones and tablets.
Energizer XP4001
What could be a better match for your tablets and smartphones on the go than an Energizer mobile battery pack? That’s the premise behind the Energizer XP4001, which is designed to be a balanced battery pack to meet most mobile needs, manufactured by XPal Power under the Energizer brand.
The Energizer XP4001 measures 5.2 by 3.2 inches, is 0.6 inches thick, like the Iogear GearPower Mobile Power Station, and weighs 5.3 ounces. It sports two USB ports for simultaneous charging of smartphones or tablets, and they actually deliver output accordingly. One port is marked ‘phones’ and the other ‘pads’. The former delivers 500mA of charge while the latter delivers 1.5A.
As PC Mag noted in its review, the Energizer XP4001’s more powerful ‘pad’ port was capable of charging an iPad 1 and high energy-consumption devices like the HTC Evo and HTC Thunderbolt. It managed to add nearly five hours of video playback time to an iPad 4. PC Mag concludes that the Energizer unit is a good value alternative to the Sanyo eneloop Mobile Booster for charging any of your smartphones and tablets on the go.