interrupted!

[cellio]

I disbelieve. How is he going to maintain connectivity while changing the battery? That takes a couple minutes (including the reboot time). He needs a whole spare phone!

Comments

[metahacker]

My spare battery/charger is external and just plugs in...

[cellio]

Huh. So, basically a battery with a USB interface? That could be useful.

[thnidu]

Exactly. My big one is made by Anker, and it feels something like an anchor in my pocket, but it does the job.

[metahacker]

(can't tell if serious, but if so, here's the one I bought: Anker PowerCore 13000. Heavy for its size, like all batteries, but nice and compact and powerful.)

[cellio]

Was serious, yes -- thanks for the info. I have a battery charger that can take USB in, but it doesn't have output -- so if I want to switch over to the spare battery I have to physically swap it in. On our trip to Europe it would have been handy a couple times to not have had to do that.

[jducoeur]

Oh, yeah -- those are bog-common (and cheap) these days. I think I own half a dozen of them by now, and keep a fully-charged one in my backpack at all times.

It's basically a battery with two USB ports: a microUSB input for charging the battery, and a standard USB output to let the battery charge the phone. You keep a standard short USB-to-micro cable with it, and you're in good shape for both directions...

[cellio]

Thanks. I've got the short cable (occasionally add juice via laptop at work), but I don't have a charger with USB out. Sounds like something I need to get.

Plus (check me on this), since it's a power source rather than a battery to put into your phone, it doesn't care about specific brand of battery, right? So replacing a phone doesn't necessarily mean replacing the extra battery and charger.

[metahacker]

Correct. It's just a power reservoir; it'll charge anything that plugs into USB.

[jducoeur]

Correct -- it's a generic power source, and should work for anything that takes USB power. Indeed, the only way in which most are specific to "phones", as a category, is that they are mostly too small to be as useful for recharging, eg, tablets. They're thoroughly interchangeable.

(Slight caveat: some phones now have a high-power charging mode -- if the power source supplies it correctly, they can charge *faster*. But AFAIK pretty much any phone will charge from a standard USB source.)

You should be able to find them in pretty much any electronics store these days. Heck, I've seen them at CVS, now that you can find some under $20...