Sadly fear of no power is higher than fear of no food! So making the right choice on devices/chargers important. Initially I thought, I would be taking the solar charger (Anker PowerPort Solar – £52.99) over the power bank (Anker PowerCore – £25.99). Using the solar charger would free me from the need to plug in somewhere. I also prefer the iPad and use it in preference to my phone any day.
However deciding which device and charging option to take was quickly resolved with the following comparison.
| iPad Pro 12.9″ | Huawei P30 | |
| Weight | 677g (inc cover 1138g) | 242g |
| Charge time using power bank | 5 hours | 1 hour 30 min |
| Charge time using solar (full sun 33°c) | 1 hour charging only increased battery from 36% to 49% | no test |
| Battery drain | 4.5 hours | 10 hours |
| Solar Charger | PowerBank | |
| Weight | 461g | 363g |
| Charge time off mains | na | 8+ hours. |
On weight the Huawei and the power bank was a no brainer.
Time to charge the Huawei also wins hands down against the iPad. A full charge of the iPad off the power bank took a little over 5 hours and just about drained the power bank. This compared to 1.5 hours to charge the Huawei off the power bank (which I also managed to charge fully 3 times over with power still remaining).
Draining the batteries of each to test how many times I could the recharge the Huawei from the power bank took a LOT of ‘effort’. I turned on every feature – wifi, bluetooth, GPS, the torch, ran every app, put sync on, turned the screen to always on, turned up the display brightness to max and left good old Bruce Springsteen playing on loop through the night and the phone still had 6% charge the following morning after 10 hours. A similar draining process on the iPad took 5 hours to a dead battery.
So its the Huawei and the power bank that goes in my back pack. Even though on the downside it takes more than 8 hours to fully charge the power bank (using a c-charge cable may improve this, but not tested).
To make the choice even easier, the Huawei also has an ultra-performance power saving mode. See post navigation/safety.