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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