When trading on the road, the last thing you want to do is run out of power for your phone, wireless broadband device, iPad or iPod. Having enough power can be the difference between being able to get out of a bad trade or losing money. Hopefully you have your stops in place, but there could be situations where you forgot to put a stop in or were using a mental stop and you lose battery power and your internet connection.
I don’t ever want to be caught without battery power, so I looked around for an affordable backup that could be used to charge my smaller devices. After doing a little research on Amazon, I found this bad boy. Here is a picture of it plugged into my Verizon MiFi Wireless Broadband connection at the beach…
This is actually how I filmed this trade review session. The Verizon device works great and the coverage is awesome, but the battery life absolutely sucks.
I’m lucky if I can get a 90 minutes on it. But I guess that is par for the course when it comes to 4G LTE devices.
That is not good if you have to do some daytrading off it or you lose track of time watching your laughing yoga videos and finally have to place a trade.
Never fear, New Trent battery to the rescue! First of all, let’s start with the name. I think that is the dumbest name for a company and yet they insist on plastering that name all over their stuff. They also named this battery the iCruiser…one of my pet peeves. Marketing Wizards need to get an original idea and stop putting “i” in front of their product names.
That being said, they make great products.
This battery takes about 7-10 hours to completely recharge. It will charge my iPhone in about 1 hour (almost completely drained) and according to their specs, it will charge an iPad 2 in 2-3 hours. I haven’t tried to completely charge the Verizon MiFi, but I have used it for 2 hours continuously and the iCruiser was still showing 3/3 bars.
In fact, there hasn’t been an occasion yet where I completely discharged the battery. I should probably do that a few times to improve the battery life, but it has been tough because it lasts so long.
If you press the power button when it is on, it shows you how much battery life is left with a three LED system. I like the design, simple with rounded corners…very nice.
There is an external A/C adapter that you plug into the battery. I would have liked to see an internal plug because that is one more thing to worry about. The battery has one USB connection, so you can charge devices with a USB cable. Their newer products have two USB ports, but I haven’t needed to charge more than one device at a time. Those are the only two drawbacks.
Oh, and it says that it will only charge 70% of a iPad 3 battery. But that is minor, since a 70% charge on an iPad 3 will still get you about 7 hours of use…plenty of time to recharge the battery.
It does add a little weight to my pack, but that is a trade off that I am willing to accept for the peace of mind that it adds. So if you are always running out of battery power for your mobile devices (or stressing about it), I would highly recommend the New Trent iCruiser.
Disclosure: I got this as a gift from my girlfriend, but it was on my Amazon wish list. I do get a commission if you buy through the links on this page, but it does NOT cost you anything extra and a portion of the proceeds go to my charity partner.
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