A powerbank is an absolute essential. Regardless of who you are, what your profession is, how big your tablet/phone battery is – you should keep a powerbank handy at all times. Keep it at the bottom of your bag, in the glove compartment of your car or in your pocket – just make sure it’s nearby!
An essential to go with your new powerbank, is the cable to connect it to your phone. Whether you’re an iDevice user or an Android user, Arkin have you sorted with their ChargeLoop keyring USB cable.
I’ve only used my cable 3 or 4 times in the 6 months I’ve owned it, but I’ve thanked the cable God’s when I have ended up using it. Trust me when I say, you’ll always run out of power or will need to copy that funny video from the event you’re at to your laptop when you don’t have the right cable handy.
I have my lightning cable on my keyring so it’s always with me and the micro USB cable in my bag just in case.
Capable of USB 2.0 transfer speeds and a max throughput of 2Amps, this cable will definitely satisfy all emergency needs.
Portable speaker
OK… so maybe not an essential for everyone. However, you’d be surprised as to how often there is a need for a speaker! At a dinner party and want some music playing softly in the background but don’t have a stereo? At the park with friends/family? An area of your house that has been converted into a gym but doesn’t have any wall outlets available? Getting some house cleaning done but too far away from your main stereo? A portable speaker can sort all of that!
The JBL Go is a compact yet powerful rechargeable, bluetooth speaker. Unlike some bluetooth speakers though, the JBL Go allows you to also input audio via a 3.5mm jack! With 5 hours of on-the-go listening capacity and weighing in at roughly 130g, this little speaker will keep the rhythm flowing no matter where you are.
Batteries… lots of batteries
These nifty little gadgets are ingenious. The requirement for AA batteries isn’t as significant as it once was, everything is slowly becoming rechargeable. However, everyone has that one item that needs a good ol’ AA battery. How often though, when you come to use that item, has the battery inside run out? Then you either have to hunt through all of the drawers in your house to find that spare AA that you know is there despite your wife’s insistence that there aren’t any left in the house (sigh).
These batteries though, you don’t dispose of. They’re USB rechargeable! (Note above: “everything is slowly becoming rechargeable”). With a split USB, you can charge 2 of these batteries at the same time in just 8 hours (500 charge cycles), which is fine for most scenarios. They have a 1,000mAh capacity and output 1.2V.
Finally, a battery that you can keep at the bottom of your bag without too significant a worry that it’ll run out before you need to use it… just charge it up every now and then! Maybe not “essential”… but damn useful!
USB stick
Most people capture and share photos and videos via email, WhatsApp/phone messaging alternatives (I use WhatsApp) or cloud storage these days. But what do you do when you don’t have an internet connection? Or your technophobe parents don’t trust the internet and believe it’s stealing their family holiday photo’s so they can’t send them to you via any means other than to print them out?
I don’t use mine often, but every now and then a USB stick comes in very useful. I have a SanDisk Ultra 64GB attached to my keyring and 99% of the time it’s blank. However there have been scenarios where I’ve needed to reimage a server at work and a DVD didn’t have the capacity to write the ISO to, or where I’ve needed to transfer/store documents, or even where I’ve needed to store extra holiday photos/video after having gotten a bit capture happy!
Regardless of it’s frequency of use, I’d advise you keep a USB stick close and ensure you go with a minimum spec of 64GB and USB 3.0 as a minimum. This gives you the perfect balance of price vs. capacity vs. performance.
As a career "IT person" and technology enthusiast, I've been around technology for over 8 years now. From enterprise-grade hardware to consumer equipment, IT Support to Systems Administrator - I'm passionate about all forms of tech, learning how it works, integrates and the scenarios in which different people would use them. I started willstocks.co.uk in 2017 and have also contributed to other websites around the Internet.
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