This gadget will solve your battery problems forever

Thousands of feet up Mount Moriah, I need to send a text. One problem: my phone battery is dead.

My wife and I had just emerged from a couple hours of uphill forest climbing into a wide-open area of steeply-inclined boulders and a few hardy alpine plants and stubby pine trees. The view is panoramic and sublime: rolling mountains that burble and finally crest into two majestic snow-capped peaks. But it’s hard to appreciate when I’ve just remembered there’s something important I need to tell my parents – who are watching our infant daughter – and I don’t have a working mobile phone.

Thankfully, I came prepared for this. Out comes the Solartab, and a few minutes later my phone is juiced up enough to send off the text. Relaxing, the wife and I chow down on trail mix while the Solartab sits there, soaking in the energy of the morning sun.

You may notice a small crack on the top left of my solar panel. That’s an issue unique to the review unit I got, so it’s not something you’ll have to deal with, but it’s worth noting that even with that crack in the glass the device functions perfectly.

The Solartab comes from a Hong Kong-based startup of the same name, and it’s a dead-simple hybrid solar charger and battery pack with pretty impressive specs. It takes up about as much space as an iPad, but it packs a beastly 13,000 mAh battery and a 5.5W solar panel. The idea behind it is that it’s basically the only backup power gadget you’ll need, and after using it for a few days I think that’s a fair assertion.

The Solartab sits there, soaking in the energy of the morning sun.

For one thing, the design is really fantastic. I get shipped a lot of Chinese gadgets to review, and puzzling through poorly-written user manuals has become one of my least favorite tasks. The Solartab comes with excellent instructions, but you’ll hardly need them because it’s basically plug and play. Want to charge something? Plug it into one of the two USB outputs. Need to charge up the Solartab? Toss it somewhere in the sun and use the folding cover to get the best angle (or don’t – I didn’t pay much attention to the angles during my charging and it still worked fine). You can even plug it into the wall at home to refill the battery if you’d like.

The Solartab has two USB ports so you can charge two devices at once if needed.

You won’t need to plug it in often, though, because 13,000 mAh is really a ridiculous amount of power. For comparison, the iPhone 6s has a 1715 mAh battery. You could use the Solartab to charge an iPhone from zero to 100 percent seven times and still have some juice left over. I plugged my Android phone into the Solartab on maximum brightness and spent hours doing battery-intensive tasks like streaming video and location-finding without even being able to knock it from the 100 percent charge indicator down to 75 percent.

The downside of all of that power, of course, is weight. Solartab claims the device has a shipping weight of 2.6 pounds (1.2 kg), and while I don’t have scale precise enough to measure it myself, it does feel heavy. That’s definitely going to matter if you’re into ultralight hiking, but I lugged it up and back down most of Moriah without feeling overburdened, and it didn’t take up much space in my pack. For most uses, the weight probably isn’t a major concern, especially since you could probably use one Solartab to keep an entire group’s phones charged for an overnight or weekend trip.