East End Tech: Charge! Increase Your Cell Phone Battery Life

You definitely know how hard it can be to keep your phone charged when you’re out and about and having fun. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had a long day out, only to have my phone battery die on me right when I need to catch a lift home. That’s certainly not what you want to have happen while you’re out during events like the Hamptons International Film Festival last weekend and want to be able to tell your friends about all the fabulousness, so here’s your guide to powering up.

The batteries I looked at measure their charge in milli-ampere-hours, or mAh. For reference, the standard iPhone 6 battery is rated at 1800mAh and should be able to power your phone for a full day with reasonably heavy usage.

The myCharge Talk & Charge is specifically designed with usability in mind, for those moments when you’re in the middle of an important call and your battery is about to die. The ultra-slim 3000mAh lithium ion battery provides enough juice to keep you talking for a whopping 13 hours and is slim enough to be comfortably held along with your phone.

If you don’t want to clutter up your purse or carry a battery around in your wallet but definitely need to charge your phone from time to time, the QBracelet from Q Designs might be up your alley. The QBracelet is—unsurprisingly—a bracelet. Except, inside of the fashionable metal shell is a 1.8 oz 1160mAh battery that can charge an iPhone up to 60 percent. Honestly, when I first heard “wearable phone battery,” I was thinking it would be a tacky black watch-thing, but Q Designs really managed to make it look phenomenal. On top of that, it’s available in silver (matte or brushed), polished gold and black (also matte or brushed). Head on over to qdesigns.co for a look.

Another option is a phone case with a built-in battery. While they do slightly increase the bulk of your phone, the extra talk time mixed with the added protection you get can more than make up for it. The juice pack by mophie has been the go-to since the original iPhone was released seven years ago, and if you’ve got up to a 5s (or a recent Samsung Galaxy phone) they’re the way to go. They even have the space pack, which adds a 1700 mAh battery and up to 64 GB of extra storage, even on the otherwise impossible to expand iPhone. They’ll be rolling out iPhone 6 and 6+ cases soon, as well.

But surely by now you’re thinking “another battery just means another thing to charge!” Well, probably the easiest way to get around that is to get something like the Poweradd Apollo. While it’s definitely a bit larger than the other offerings I’ve talked about, the difference with the Apollo is that it has solar panels. Forgot to charge your backup battery? Hey, no worries. Just throw it out into somewhere with light, and you’re back in business. The Apollo can be had with 7200, 10000, and 23000 mAh batteries—the 23000 mAh version can power a laptop. A solar battery charger is practically indispensable for when your desire to get away and need to keep in touch collide spectacularly.

Last, if you want to fuse good old-fashioned body power with your phone’s battery life, you could grab NXG’s NX-POWER-2600 hand-cranked charger. With a 2600mAh battery that can be charged with only a few hours of painstaking hand-cranking, you’ll never want for battery life.

Now go start snapping those photos…and share them in our Dan’s Pics photo pages!