Electricity. Access to it gives a meeting planner superpowers… I said the same thing in this post and because something was said twice on the internet, it must be true. But what about when you are out saving the world from the scourge of bad conferencing and there is no outlet? No matter how bomb-diggity your phone or tablet is it can’t help you stop whatever event-killing-monster is lurking in the dark if it can’t be powered up.
Enter the portable charger. Specifically the Poweradd™ Pilot S 12000mAh. This ain’t one of those itty bitty things that you get as a give-away at whatever industry event you were at last week, this is the real deal for charging phones and tablets a-bunch-o-times. This thing even has two USB ports (a 5V/2.1A and 5V/1.0A) so you can charge two devices at once. This is secret weapon worthy.
Here are the specs as we found them:
Fast Charging Capability – Here are the times it took to charge:
- My Samsung Galaxy 5s from 51%-98% – About an hour
- An iPhone 5s from 60%-100% – A little less than an hour
Charged both back to back and the thing still had a ton of power left. Cool.
According to the Manufacturer
- The Pilot S has more than 500 charge cycles during its lifetime (I will never know because I will lose it)
- The Pilot S battery pack contains a powerful 12000mAh battery which can fully charge all iPhones 5 to 6 times, a Galaxy S4 3 to 4 times, and an iPad twice (I will believe this when I see it but it did charge 3 iPhones and a Galaxy S5 when we first unboxed it)
Charging the Device
It takes approximately 10 hours to charge this bad boy so I usually plug it in overnight. The nice thing is that once charged, it will last months in your bag and you always know it is charged because it has a nifty little gauge that will tell you how much power is left (see the picture).
Conclusion
I just had a client event in Europe where I had to take a couple of flights (Chicago to Brussels, Brussels to London) and my phone and tablet were charged up the whole time. I was able to work and be entertained without resorting to the awful seat-back system. That right there is worth the price of admission and although I like mine for how well it charges my stuff, I like the price even better.
You can grab one of these on Amazon for about $20 which is totally doable for most meeting and event peeps regardless of where you fall in the pecking order.
