Jan 13, 2009
My constant quest for empowerment – a confession
Being on the road in various places, and out of the office at events a lot recently has made me realise quite how power-hungry I have become in recent months.
In fact, you could say that over the last few years I’ve been increasingly obsessed with power, as my working and personal lives have collided and colluded to mean I crave power more than ever.
It grabs me at random times and always in unexpected places. On the tube. At conferences and events. In airport lounges, conscious of a long stretch of bored hours ahead.
My need for power has even started to influence my packing decisions – at first it was just when I was going away for holidays and conferences, but increasingly, I find myself carrying around chargers and converters and cables just in case I need to jack in, plus peripherally scanning conference venues, hotel rooms, airport departure gates and even train stations for power-points with the half-formed thought of being able to boost energy levels for a short while.
The thing is, previous phones (mainly Nokia) and devices (e.g 80GB video iPod, Macbook) were built with decent batteries which gave (at worst – macbook about 6-8) several hours or (at best – my most recent nokia could handle a week, easy) several days of power to the device.
My more recent iphone and msi-wind/advent netbook cloud-computing and wifi-dependent/enabled lifestyle, combined with taking and publishing a lot of photos makes me incredibly power-hungry.
My netbook battery gives me 3 hours of use without wifi turned on, and a paltry 1.5-2 if connected. The iPhone can eke out a couple of days (as long as I don’t use it and it stays in one place so doesn’t need to hunt for a new cell) or drain out in mere hours if playing a game. Useless!
I feel like I spend a disproportionate amount of time thinking about and looking for cables and battery levels and converters and power points, and my packing lists regularly start these days with assorted cables and chargers rather than being the tedious nearly-forgotten scrawl at the very end.
When we went to California in December, I took:
- A power cable for my netbook
- A usb power cable for iphone and ipod
- A charger for my nikon camera battery (and spare battery)
- A charger for my nintendo DS
- oh and spare battereis for the Flip
That may not sound like much, but it’s ridiculous to have to heft all these things around with me whenever I take a trip of more than a few days. Bear in mind that I usually carry the first two and the last one with me every day in my handbag, too.
It’s good that I can charge the iphone via USB, but then I need to carry the netbook power lead, which is way bigger and bulkier than necessary, and doubles the bother of lugging it around. I’ve had people recommend a spare battery for the netbook, but that doesn’t solve the business trip problem. What I need is a lightweight, compact power charger for the netbook. Does such a thing exist?
Either that or a decent battery life for both netbook and iphone. Is that too much to ask?
In the meantime, until I can find a more portable or longer-lasting solution, I’ll just have to continue being a power-crazed geek. Welcome to my life.
I look forward to any useful suggestions here as I have exactly the same problem!
Ditto.
Probably a very obvious suggestion but: where do you end up with the laptop most of the time? If you spend a large proportion of your time at another location (e.g. friend’s house, office, even perhaps a Starbucks if the manager is friendly) it might be worth depositing a spare charger/laptop cable there. Then have one at home and one where you’re going. It wouldn’t get rid of the requirement to have a cable with you, but it might reduce the amount of times you have to take it along. Also, a spare, fully charged laptop battery is well worth it. It’s still a lump to carry around, but it’ll save you the hassle of seeking a safe and accessible power point.
I think this will do the phone and the DS?
http://www.callpod.com/products/chargepod
There are all kinds of power packs, airplane chargers and even solar chargers (which look interesting). However I dont know how many actually work.
I recently purchased this Phillips Power2charger thingie on a business trip in an airport shop (where these things tend to be sold) mostly to juice up my iPhone and other phones. Sadly, the thing doesnt hold a charge for very long, and doesnt even fully charge the iPhone. Its pretty useless, so beware!
I feel your pain, it was a rough sea 2 days ago and a very high tide, so I took canon 5D out me and thought I would and take some shots of the sea battering the beach at its worst. I got 6 shots and then dead battery, I forgot the spare battery and the extra battery grip witch takes AA’s. massive fail on my part, just to hope that the next hight tide coincides with a strong southernly wind.
Maybe technology could help here – bra power.
After lack of copy and paste, my biggest bugbear with the iPhone is the battery life (and lack of simple controls to adjust power management). It could do with energy profiles that you can switch into (like a shortcut button to put it in a low energy mode which shuts off wifi, and maybe sets a max volume for music) … if they can’t get a decent battery life, they should make it changeable.
But the problem I find is now keeping track of it all – several times I’ve wound up at events thinking the battery in my camera is charged, and only getting one photo (if that). Damn annoying ;-)
solar power – for around £200 you can get (can’t remember where but I’m sure Google can help) a laptop charger – same as they use in the army innit
Heh. When I read the first few paragraphs, I thought that you were discussing a different type of power. The kind that one gets from ruling over people and such. I only know you from your blog, but it made the post very strange to read until the light came on in my head. Apparently, I am not power hungry enough to keep my brain charged at all times.
Jessica, I must confess that I was being deliberately confusing in the first bit of this post. Sorry!
I’m not really power-mad at all. Just seem to be increasingly dependent on the electrical kind.
Thanks for all the suggestions of power supplies and the like. I think a £200 solar charger might be overkill, somewhat!
Mike, I know what you mean about the iphone and energy saving settings. That would be awesome – though I have found that killing 3G and location services and making sure Wifi is turned off after I’ve stopped using it all go a long way to making the battery go a little further. Oh, and not playing Crash Kart :)
Ooh, what about this wristband?
I have the same netbook and use it when travelling. I bought an iGo Juice power thingy from Maplin for a mere £35 on sale. It works great with the MSI Wind/Advent 4211 (I think I use tip 3), it works on the ground (110-240v), and also works in cars and on planes. The other great thing about it is that it can also power a secondary device such as a phone. You can order extra adaptors from their website or even buy them in Maplin for a fiver.
I see it’s gone back up in price but they have other options to choose from.
Only problem I have now is that my boss was so impressed with it that he appears to have ‘confiscated’ it for his own purposes… :(