With so many fun and useful apps and features available on your Android smartphone, running the battery down to nothing in a day or less is frightfully easy. A solution many have pursued is an external battery pack, which frees you from the need to find an emergency outlet and to always carry your cord around. What kind of battery pack you choose depends on your lifestyle and the amount of charging capacity you want.
Mophie Charging Case
Attaching extra power to your phone via an attractive phone case is the best solution for those of us who tend to lose things. You may not find it convenient to carry around a battery pack and a cord during your daily life. These juice packs don’t carry the same amount of power that external packs do, but they’re fantastic in a pinch, like when you get to work and realize you forgot to charge your phone.
Mophie cases are relatively thin, considering that they contain extra battery power, and they have an LED display that shows you how much power the case has left. The Mophie juice pack that fits the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge, for example, contains enough juice (2,500mAh) to give your battery 60 percent of a full charge. This could give you up to 12 hours of extra talk time.
RAVPower 22,000mAh External Battery Pack
When you need a portable charger that can handle multiple Android devices, a long string of travel days, or some serious time without any electricity, then you need the RAVPower 22,000mAh External Battery Pack. RAVPower offers a slew of high-powered battery packs, and this one is perfect for families or people who own a bunch of different devices.
The RavPower has smart technology that figures out what charging speed is best for the devices you plug into it. It also offers three USB ports; with that much power, you can easily charge three Android devices at once. It’s a little bulky: almost seven inches long, almost three inches across, and almost an inch thick. But if you’re carrying multiple devices, you’ve already got space for it in one of your bags.
ZeroLemon Charging Case
ZeroLemon is a Mophie competitor, offering the same sort of sleek, black charging cases that Mophie offers. The ZeroLemon cases are designed to help your phone withstand drops by providing extra protection, and tend to come with a bit more battery power than the Mophie cases do. For example, the ZeroLemon case for the Galaxy Note 5 offers 3,500mAh, compared with Mophie’s 2,500mAh.
However, the ZeroLemon case isn’t as attractive as the Mophie case. It’s a bit bulkier, and unlike Mophie’s case, which integrates the power bank into the case, the ZeroLemon power bank is removable. You may find that more convenient, since you can charge it without plugging in the whole case, or less convenient, since there’s something extra to lose.
TravelCard Charger
The TravelCard is a battery pack roughly the size of a credit card. It’s a little thicker than that, which means it might be hard to get into your wallet, but it’s still lightweight, tiny, and a totally genius idea. You don’t have to give up your existing phone case to get a power case, and you don’t have to lug around a battery pack (though, of course, other battery packs are smaller than the large RAVPower ones). The TravelCard fits well in your purse or pocket if you can’t get it into your wallet.
Each side of the TravelCard contains a plug: one side is a micro USB for your device, and the other is a standard USB for charging the TravelCard itself. The only downside is its comparatively small battery. Because the device is so thin, it can only offer 1,500mAh of power, which is sufficient for about half of a full charge. That’s better than nothing when you’re in a bind, though.
Large external battery packs are perfect for families and for people who travel a lot and don’t always have time to stop and plug in at an outlet. Smaller packs and cases are perfect for daily use, when you only need a zap of extra power to get you through the end of the day.
