What is the best portable solar charging product for you to use on your smartphone? We take a look at some products and give you our opinion on just how good they are.
USB phone chargers are actually quite numerous and available at decent prices. The question is: do they actually work?
We had a solar powered smartphone charger back in the early days of the smartphone around twelve years ago. In fact, it would have been androind v1.0 which doesn’t even have a cool name like all the rest of them up until android 10.
The charger in question used the power of the sun to charge a battery and that battery could be used to re-charge the smartphone. You could also plug the charger into the power supply and charge it that way.
Our charger was quite reasonably priced and that seems to hold true today with the prices we’ve seen. So without further ado, let’s look at some of the solar phone chargers we found and some specifications.
Chinese Solar Chargers
Ebay and other online retailers are full of chargers like these. They don’t seem to have any type of recognised brand name, so the sellers on ebay in particular just describe exactly what they are, what they do and the capacity of the charger. This page has a bunch of solar powered phone chargers from China sold by Amazon sellers and ebay about the same price we paid back in the day for ours, but these look to be much heavier duty.
Available in blue, orange, black or green, the ‘10000mah Dual-USB Waterproof Solar Power Bank Charger’ is made in China, shipped from mainland China, Hong Kong or Taiwan. Makes sense as we’ve previously mentioned producing batteries is ultra efficient and cheap in China.
There’s not much more to say since the title took care of everything, but you’d be getting a new, 5V battery charger which would come in original packaging, unopened (presumably because it’s new), but if coming directly from the manufacturer, it may come in plain packaging.
It seems these batteries are being mass produced for several companies who brand them as they wish before offering them up for retail sale in the UK, US and Euripe. We guess they’d deal witht the branding directly at the factory of origin in China.
You’re probably getting a decent quality product here, and for £7.72 each including postage and packing, you can’t really go wrong. The charger also performs the duty of a light, so if you ever find yourself in the middle of nowhere, you can avoid tripping on some roots as a cerial killer is chasing you through the campsite.
MobileSolarChargers.co.uk
Now these guys go all out with a variety of different chargers. They generally look similar to the ones offered on ebay, so perhaps that’s where they source the original parts?
They have some really heavy-duty folding solar chargers and waterproof power banks. If you’re ever caught short out and about, you needn’t worry that your smartphone would run out of juice, because you could get it back to 100% in a jiffy using 100% renewable energy from the sun.
Taking a leaf out of the Chinese ebay seller’s handbook, the title of the product we’ll take a closer look at is ‘MSC Weekend Camping 13W Solar, 2 x Power Banks, 2 x LED light, £20 Saving’. Got to get that ‘saving’ keyword in there.
Ratehr than a specific solar charger, this is a mega pack containing several different products that are all related. As the title implies, the package is designed for a weekend camping trip. With this array of power, you could turn a muddy autumn weekend into the glamping trip of a lifetime.
You can choose exactly how much power you want, mixing and matching as the total price updates automatically for you. What’s great is their sales page has good quality pictures and explains why their chargers would be a good choice.