Charge Your Phone on the Trail
Many of you trail riders love your electronic gadgets. And you have found that cell phones are especially handy while navigating long trails. You use them to take pictures & video; they come in handy as GPS units for trail navigation; smart phone apps such as Motion X, Bike Maps & Trailsare nice also; and don’t forget little apps such as calculator, flashlight, currency converters & weather programs.Heck, some of you even use them for crazy things like communicating with others… what a concept!!
But as you have found out on occasion, there is one problem with smart phones on the trail. They are not blessed with unlimited power. Think about how many times you’ve run out of phone juice while out wandering the bike paths? I learned, early on, to have back-up power. For example, my Mophie battery power case comes in extremely handy for day-long trips. In most cases, it lasts just long enough to get me to the end of the day/trail. But it has drawbacks. For example, it has limited power and many peripheral phone devices don’t work with the power case surrounding my iPhone.
One possible solution to the power drain is a product called SpinPower by Bike2Power. By attaching SpinPower to your bike, it harnesses the power of your tire rotation to charge your cell phone. It works with both the Android and the iPhone and looks as if it’s easy to hook up. It can be used with almost any type of bike, but the website seems to be especially keen on using it while riding smooth trails. Although it can be used on road bikes, I get the impression that is not the ideal situation. It would also work fine on a mountain bike, but is not recommended for rough, bumpy trails. It would appear that rail-trails, urban trails, suburban trails, and park trails would be ideally suited for using Bike2Power’s SpinPower products.
1 comments
Our cellphone server, NTTDoCoMo, supply us with a re-chargeable battery pack, mine is permanently in my bike-kit.