Prepared for Power - However it Comes!

Published by Steve Litchfield at 13:05 UTC, July 29th 2009

Steve Litchfield explains his power arrangements when heading out into the wild.

It's that time of the year again. When I get ready to head out into the wilds. Armed with nothing more than my trusty smartphone (in years past, a Nokia 9500, an E61i and an E90, this year it's the E75's turn), the aim is to keep in touch with the world even when camped miles from anywhere with my family. But what about power? How can I keep my smartphone supplied with juice? Not mention the barrage of 'Daddy, my xxxx's battery is flat' complaints, all of which need to be handled quickly if a peaceful atmosphere is to be maintained!

Here's my entire power kit. All in the one small cloth bag:

I thought you might be interested in what I keep to hand, pruned after three successive camping expeditions:

Clockwise, from top-left: 

• A no-name, tri-voltage Solar charger/1100mAh battery/LED torch from eBay(!)
• Proporta 12V to dual-USB and mains to dual-USB adapters
• USB to miniUSB cable
• Proporta 3400mAh mobile charger
• retractable Proporta USB to female Nokia 3mm jack cable, Nokia to Samsung adapter, Nokia to Nintendo DS adapter, Nokia to Nokia 2mm adapter, Nokia to iPod/iPhone adapter
• Nokia 3mm female to Nokia 2mm adapter and a proprietary Nokia charging cable for taking power from the first item on this list, the solar charger.

Not shown in the photo are a Nokia to microUSB adapter (because I don't need it this year) and a car 12V to Nokia 2mm charger (because this always lives in the car glovebox)

The kit listed above allows me to take power from:

• the sun (infrequent, this is the UK!)
• my car (when actually driving)
• from mains electricity (if available on some camp sites)
• from an acquaintance's laptop/desktop (unlikely, but you never know)
• or, if none of those are to hand, by using up the two Lithium-Ion batteries, with a combined capacity of about 4500mAh, enough for three complete charges of the E75, even allowing for transfer inefficiencies. At worst, I might be able to get most of the way through the week on just the batteries, but my policy is to top these up at every opportunity so that I'm always 'prepared'.

And no, this is not all so that I can be a workaholic and stay working through a holiday - part of it is staying in touch with important emails, I'll admit, but a large part of smartphone use on holiday is listening to podcasts and music, taking photos and videos, navigating, looking things up on Google maps or Wikipedia, writing up a diary, and so on.

In addition to my smartphone needs, and partly explaining why the whole kit is a little Over The Top, I'm also expecting to recharge my wife's phone (a Nokia E51), my daughter's phone (a Samsung non-descript), two iPods (wife and daughter's) and two Nintendo DS game consoles. 

Well, there we are. That's me sorted for a week away - do you think my kit will cope with those needs? What do you rely on, on similar trips?

Steve Litchfield, All About Symbian, 30th July 2009

Categories: How To, Comment, Hardware
Platforms: General