Ampere by Hannes Grobe

If I’m ever going to travel lighter, I must have the ability to downsize my electronics. First and foremost I need a cell phone. Travel overseas, or anywhere else for that matter, virtually requires a cell phone, at least as often as it is possible to have access to one. The next issue of concern is having an electronic device with a screen larger than a cell phone to connect to the Internet. In the past I have always used a laptop computer but I think that my days of carrying around a laptop and a charger are numbered. First, there is the problem of weight. A small laptop such as a netbook is going to come in at 2-3.5 pounds with the charger. There’s no way around that weight. Even with a slim batter, it’s hard to come in under two pounds. An extended life (10+hour) battery sends the weight up to about 3.5 pounds.

A tablet, on the other hand, comes in around 12-16 ounces. That’s a significant difference, especially when you consider that the tablet comes standard with 8-12 hours of battery life and can be recharged with an external battery pack that can also be used to recharge a cell phone and an increasing variety of power sources such as AAA and other size batteries that are used by devices that utilize battery power such as an led flashlight or a camera. By traveling with devices that can be charged from a battery pack instead of a wall outlet, you cut your weight down dramatically. You no longer need to carry a wall outlet charger of any kind. Nor must you absolutely connect to a wall outlet frequently to charge your devices.

So what’s the major consideration when looking at tablet mAh (milliamp hours) ratings? The main thing is to understand that it’s necessary to have them to get some idea of the size of the device you need to charge up your devices if there are no electrical outlets available. Most of the time you won’t need to know the exact milliamp rating of your device. Generally, I know from doing a little research when I Googled “typical tablet battery mAh comparison” that most tablets are in the 6,00 to 8,000 mAh rating with some going as low as 4.000 and some as high as 10,000 milliamps. I did this because I’m interested in purchasing a “portable cell phone power bank”, a term that can be used to find battery packs that are used for charging up devices that connect to a USB port to charge. By knowing my mAh needs I can estimate how big of a battery pack I’m going to require to keep my devices working.