Review: Getting the most battery life on long flights

I fly internationally at least once per quarter, and have done so for nearly three years. As such, I’ve long needed a way to get enough battery life to sustain me during 8-12 hours of flight time. I’ve seen others try to make do by buying 1-3 extra laptop batteries of whatever kind is standard to their laptop. I always carry an extra battery of this sort, but it’s not a good solution for long-haul flights.

In the past, therefore, I always used the Electrovaya PowerPad 160, which Brad Kuhn of the Free Software Foundation recommended to me back in 2003 at the eGovOS Conference.

It was a great recommendation: I got roughly seven to ten hours of uptime, depending on what I was doing. (If watching DVDs, battery life was closer to seven hours; if working on email/Office applications, I got closer to ten and sometimes more.)

The PowerPad 160 is not cheap ($369 at current discount on the site), nor is it light (2.4 lbs.), but its shape (quite thin – I would just slip it into my laptop bag behind my laptop and then into the seat pocket in front of me on a flight) makes it very usable. Given that some of my most productive work time is when I’m unplugged from email and IM distractions, it’s money well spent.

Unfortunately, the PowerPad 160 is not compatible with my current laptop, a MacBook Pro. It works fine with just about everything else, but Apple’s MacBook line has a cool magnetic AC adaptor that doesn’t work with the PowerPad (yet). So I had to find something else.

So far as I could find, there is only one extended battery option for the MacBook Pro, and it’s a great one. Battery Geek’s Portable Power Station. I just started using it yesterday, and the battery life is phenomenal. I ran it for ten hours with iTunes running, which would have finished the PowerPad 160 in seven hours or so.

(Note: Battery Geek’s website claims it will run for six hours, but it does much, much better than that. I asked their customer service representative why the number isn’t higher on the website, and he said only because they have not extensively tested battery life yet and so they didn’t want to put too high of a number on the web. So, trust me instead: this battery will go…and go…and go.)

Its form factor is not as convenient as the PowerPad (Battery Geek’s Portable Power Station is bulky, though not as wide/tall). And it’s a bit more expensive ($449 for the highest-end battery) and two pounds heavier than the PowerPad 160 (4.4 lbs.). Plus, it’s slightly more complex to use, as you have to set the voltage you want (which means you need to know the voltage you need – this can be found on the bottom of your laptop, of course, but it would be better for most people to not have to worry about knowing this sort of thing), while the PowerPad is simply a matter of plugging it in and away you go.

That said, so far as I know, the PowerPad can’t be used with mobile phones and what not, whereas the Portable Power Station comes with a huge array of connectors for every laptop under the sun, and allows you to plug in a mobile USB connector to power these devices, too.

Both will work with a wide range of laptops, but the Portable Power Station is the only extended battery that will work with an Apple MacBook.

My verdict? If you ever fly internationally, you need one of these batteries. Both are great and will serve you well, keeping you productive (or not 🙂 while in the air. The Portable Power Station will serve you longer and on your MacBook, if that’s what you have. But you can’t go wrong with either battery.