Tech Blog

[#1]

As I found out recently, depending what you're doing with your iPhone or iPod Touch, the battery life can be adequate or very short lived.

Recently when travelling, I relied on a very nifty little backup battery device from Griffin -- the Griffin Powerblock Reserve .

As you can see from the photo, it's not a very imposing device, yet it is quite powerful in its own way.

Basically, it's an external rechargeable battery that's designed to recharge and run your i-device when the internal battery gets low.

And it does this very very well. The battery component just plugs in to the base of your iPhone or iPod Touch and starts recharging the internal battery.

The big, friendly battery button on the front activates a 'status' bar of mini-leds that show the amount of internal battery power left when charging your i-device.

It's kinda small, and when attached, doesn't really interfere with the regular use of the iPhone other than adding a bit of bulk to the bottom.

I found that when recharging, my iPod Touch was fully charged after about an hour or so...from a low charge state. I'm not sure how this would work with an iPhone.

A feature that I found cool was how the battery connected to the charging unit -- it uses a magnet to keep the battery in place, and uses induction to recharge the batteries. As the batteries charge, the same green LEDs keep you apprised of the charging state. All lit == a fully charged battery.

And the keen-eyed observers out there would have noticed in the first image that the charger comes with a USB charging port too, which is great for charging other external devices.

And that's really it. A simple device charger that works as expected, extending the useful life of your i-device.