We get asked a lot about which tablets we recommend. Without wading into the Android vs Apple melee, we wanted to offer our opinion from a solar charging perspective. If you’re powering your gadgets from solar, you want them to run for a long time on a small battery. This means that you need less time in the sun to get an hour of runtime on the device and you can bring a smaller system or have power left over to charge other devices. So without further ado, we introduce a new statistic for your consideration: Hours Runtime per Watt Hour of Battery, or RpWH.
Model | Battery Capacity (Wh) | Runtime* (hours) | RpWh (hours) |
iPad Mini | 16.6 | 12.7 | 0.77 |
Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 | 18.9 | 12.0 | 0.63 |
Nexus 7 (32GB) | 16.0 | 9.8 | 0.61 |
Kindle Fire 8.9 | 16.3 | 9.0 | 0.55 |
ASUS Eee Pad | 25.0 | 10.3 | 0.41 |
iPad 2 | 25.0 | 9.9 | 0.39 |
Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 | 25.9 | 9.9 | 0.38 |
Surface RT | 31.5 | 9.6 | 0.30 |
iPad (late 2012) | 42.5 | 11.1 | 0.26 |
* Runtime is obviously variable so we used Engadget’s battery life numbers to have consistency across the analysis.
If you ask us, we’ll say that the iPad Mini is a great tablet for traveling. It gives you a lot of runtime on not much battery. The other 7″ tablets like the Galaxy Tab 7.7 and Nexus 7 are also good if you’re relying on portable power. The latest full-sized iPads with Retina display eat up a lot more power, almost 3X the Mini so we recommend you use at least 8 Watt systems for them.
In terms of solar, you could get up to 35 minutes of runtime on the Mini from a hour in the sun with one of our 3.4 Watt solar panels and V11 USB Battery. Our 4 Watt systems would give you up to 45 minutes of runtime for an hour in the sun and our 7 and 8 Watt systems would give you more than an hour of runtime for every hour in the sun.
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