Blog of a Long Distance Worker Tech

The blog about mobile tech

Tag Archives: Charging

Powered Flight…

… or in other words, having a good charging solution for your charge hungry smartphone, MiFi and tablet. This is where the A-solar Power Bank Pro comes in.a-solar-power-bank-pro

I have always prided myself on always having the best tech, particularly when it comes to smartphones, Wi-Fi gadgets and tablets. However one of the banes of my life is the poor battery life that much of this kit comes with, particularly with the smartphones. One solution I have had is to always make use of the latent charging capabilities of my netbook/notebook, by ensuring that I can charge everything over standard USB leads. This has worked well but it has not been always the most ergonomic solution, with cables appearing out of bags and always having to ensure that I am charging on shutdown to ensure that the port power is not shutdown when I go into suspend mode (I know some laptops do have an always on port).

So I cast around and found the A-solar Power Bank Pro, which gives me 5000mAh of charging goodness. This can be fed to your USB based devices either via a standard USB output with 500mA capability, or via the very iPad and MiFi friendly 1000mA USB output. The key and very important feature here is that they can be both used at the same time to charge two devices, even a combination of iPhone and iPad. I have now been using this for a good three months during which I have kept myself running during long travel days into and out of London, as well as the much more demanding weekend in Amsterdam, whilst I was running around Koninginnedag. The London travel days stressed my Smartphone battery through running it fully active (browsing and tweeting) for the full 4 hours of travel time each day, plus all the normal usage going from meeting to meeting, including heavy GPS usage from the Walking Directions features of Google Navigation. A much more demanding test of its capability was the Koninginnedag weekend, during which I double handed an iPhone and an Android phone, taking video and photographs and posting to Facebook and Twitter throughout the day via an unlocked MiFi. It kept me going so I never lost connectivity and never lost a photo opportunity. It even charges overnight from a standard USB port, so it really cuts out the need to have an additional power block, and it fits well within an inside or outside suit pocket, or cargo trousers/shorts.

This is an excellent device to extend your smartphone, iPad, iPhone or MiFi life on even the heaviest data usage days, and can really recommend you get one, and at between €39 and €49 it is a snip. I got mine whilst passing through Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, for the lower price Smile

iOS4.2, the iPad and the Laptop/Netbook

Brook Crothers of CNET seems to believe he can now make the iPad work for him…

CNET’s Brook Crothers claims that with the launch of iOS 4.2, he is pretty much ready to abandon his MacBook Air in favor of full-time use of his iPad. Even before the upgrade to the mobile OS, Crothers found that he was almost exclusively using the 3G tablet in the airport, hotel and plane for his various tasks.

via iOS 4.2 makes iPad a productivity rival for MacBook Air, says CNET.

I do believe that iOS4.2 has made the iPad much more usable (although the multi-tasking is still not a great improvement), I do not agree that it replaces the ultra-light laptop. I think however that this is down to whether you are a generator of content or a viewer of content. I am a generator of content, which I though that Brook would be as well, but maybe my content generation is more feature rich than his. I do not just generate copy for others to work into something pretty, I have to do the pretty too with documents and emails.

After all, although I own an iPad, I am not carrying it with me as I have my one device that does it all – my nice ultra-light 13inch Asus UL30, currently with 10% battery used and still with over 9 hours of batter life left, which is going to come in useful to charge my less than 5 hours MiFi via USB in a moment…something I cannot do via the iPad! (In action shot below… apologies for the low light, this is on a bus crawling its way along in the snow on a cold Amsterdam evening!)

Never caught short of power

One of the most useful features of the modern laptop is the always powered USB port – a port (or all ports) that have their 5V, 500mA supply always available regardless of whether the laptop is on or off. How is this useful? Well if you are like me and have pretty much all of your business and travel tech rechargeable from a USB lead, this means that you can always boost your kit in transit from your laptop. This is particularly potent when you have a modern laptop with an enormous battery giving 10 hours+.

iphone_battery Of course, you have to make sure that all your devices are chargeable from a USB cable, but then that can be easy these days unless you have a liking for old Nokia mobile phones.

Mobile Charging

There has been much press today about how the mobile phone companies have standardised on a single charger and cable interface for future mobile phones. This will obviously simplify the whole mobile situation when you are in need of quick charge and have not brought your charger with you – you can borrow one, but apparently it will also lead to further cost reduction for the manufacturer and consumer, but also less profit as accessories are standardised (although the manufacturers can through other wrenches into the problem like strange positioning of the connectors on the phone so a standard base station cannot be used etc).

However this is all old news, with many of the same manufacturers in the announcement today from the Mobile World Congress announcement having already announced standardisation to Micro USB in 2007, with thanks to Pocket PC Thoughts for the article.

It is a shame that they did not standardise on Mini USB, at least for me as all of my mobiles, several of my MP3 players and some bluetooth headsets are Mini-USB charged, but I can understand that there is a deep need to use a smaller connector. I just hope that it is robust enough. At the end of the day, it will just mean that I will need to buy a number of USB2 A type to USB Micro cables for the new devices or have an adapter – when I get a phone that has the new adapter that is. By the way, the Micro USB is the far left one in the picture, next to the mini-USB.

This leads into one of the best pieces of advice to a mobile worker – make sure your current device is standardised to either Mini or Micro USB, so that you can share cables and chargers quite liberally – it has allowed me to really reduce down what I need to carry. After all, I just (wastefully) turn my laptop into a universal charger when i am away, and even have a simple mobile boost system with my EeePC as it has active power USB ports when in standby – allowing the charging of mobiles even when it is closed and in my bag :-) .