Keeping the iPhone Charged
While I was in San Diego for the past few days, perhaps the biggest challenge–aside from never having more than 10 minutes to myself at a stretch–was keeping my iPhone’s battery charged. The Sales Kick Off meeting we had for Check Point had us anywhere but near an easily accessible AC port. I attempted to plan for this, and I normally have an external iPhone battery for this purpose.
Unfortunately, on my recent trip to Israel, the connector on my latest battery acquisition from eBay broke. That’s what happens when you get the cheap ones made in China. Either way, I did not have time to acquire something better before I left for this trip to San Diego.
I searched through my gadget stash and found an old Solio charger. While I wasn’t counting on it’s ability to get juice from the sun, it was able to receive a charge from USB. When fully charged, it was able to provide some extra juice to my iPhone. It certainly didn’t give the battery more than an extra 25-30% or so, but it was enough. It also fit in my pocket (albeit not comfortably) along with the iPhone.
I also took some other measures to conserve battery power as well: I dropped WiFi and Bluetooth. While there was plenty of WiFi around, I could not always use it nor did I necessarily want to. I only enabled it when I know I wanted to use it. That alone cut my battery drain to a fairly managable level.
The other thing: I forgot my iPhone’s AC adapter. This meant I need to plug into a Mac/PC to charge. It also meant that I was not able to easily charge my iPhone the night before I left San Diego. I had a very early morning flight and made the mistake of not leaving my MacBook turned on but not logged in. This meant my iPhone barely got a charge overnight.
The Solio came to my rescue again. I had wisely charged it the day before, so I was able to use it to provide a boost on the flight back to Seattle. The Solio did require some significant fiddling to get it to charge the iPhone without receiving the dreaded “charging with this accessory is not supported” message on my iPhone.
Meanwhile, I’m in the market for a mobile charging solution for my iPhone. Preferably something that will fit comfortably in my pocket with my iPhone 3GS, is durable, easily rechargable, but not insanely expensive. I realize that’s a bit much to ask, but any suggestions from the peanut gallery on this?
