Topeak Smartphone Holder w/Powerpack

You might use your phone for recording your rides these days, and you might also use it for routefinding. And you might find that the battery life doesn't quite match up to your epic ride expectations. That's where a product like the SmartPhone Holder with PowerPack 7800mAh (catchy name) comes in.

At its heart it's a battery from which you charge your phone or Garmin or iPad or lights or whatever. Its 7800mAh capacity is decent, enough for two or three mobile phone charges or five full juicings of a Garmin Edge 520, so it'd need to be a pretty long ride before you'd exhausted it. On top of that (well, around that actually) there's a silicone cover that doubles both as a phone holder and also as a bike mount. You fit your phone to the stretchy straps on the top – and they're very stretchy, so plus-sized phones are okay – and you velcro the underside to your stem (better) or bars (not as good; more on that later) so you can see your phone while you're riding along. Handy if you're following a route on it.

You can pull the battery out of the silicone cover and use it as a standard battery too, but since a 10000mAh battery will cost you about 15 quid on Amazon and this is £69.99 at full retail, the reason to buy it would be the mounting option. So should you? Well, it depends.

It works as a mount, no doubt about that. It only mounts in one spot and the mount itself is made of rubber, so it does tend to wobble a bit. That means it's not transferring shock to the phone, which is a good thing, but the display of your phone can be a bit hard to read at times, which isn't. The wobbling can lead to the battery rotating around what it's mounted to. This was much more of an issue when mounted on the bars than the stem, probably because there's more of the weight of the unit further away from the axis of rotation.

You get a micro USB lead with the battery (complete with cable tidy) and you can plug your phone in simply enough and off you go. On the back of the battery there's a level indicator which is handy for knowing how much you have left, and the battery also features an LED light which is pretty handy for rooting around in your saddlebag after dark on that 400km audax. I left my phones (Motorola Moto G, and more recently Sony Xperia Z5 compact) plugged in and it kept them topped up just so. The Xperia in particular has a long battery life anyway, and even with the screen on full time for routing I reckon I'd get a good 15 hours out of the phone and battery setup. There are 1A and 2.1A USB sockets for lower and higher capacity devices, and you can use both at once.

My Xperia Z5c is fully waterproof, even the USB port, which means I can use it for routefinding in the rain. The main issue with this battery is that it's not waterproof, and so you can't effectively use it as a mount for your waterproof phone in a deluge.

Given that the main reason for buying one would be to extend your ride time, and we live in the UK where going outside for anything over about half a day means you're going to get wet at some point, that's a fairly serious failing. You can sling a sandwich bag over the whole thing, of course, but it's not an elegant solution. And you can't keep the battery out of harm's way when it's raining and then put it back when the sun comes out, because the mount doesn't work without the battery in. What you can do is turn the battery around in the mount so the ports are protected from the weather.

That means you can't charge your phone while it's raining but I'm pretty sure the battery would survive almost anything like that. If it rains all day on your audax you'll have to recharge at coffee stops. Which, obviously, you could do anyway, with a much cheaper battery.

The ports are reasonably well protected from the rain: they're at the back of the battery, facing away from the direction of travel, and there's a silicone lip around the exposed end protecting them a bit more. You'd probably get away with it for showers, but if you're relying on the battery to get you home on a long ride it's not worth taking chances.

Overall then, a mixed bag. It's still a useful thing, and great for long rides in the sunshine but the lack of waterproofing makes it less useful for UK conditions.

Verdict

Good battery with decent mounting options for your phone, but not so good in the rain