Solar charger anyone ? Need advice

Hi there. I need to spend 3-4 months in the jungle and will not have access to electrical current every day. I need a solar charger capable of charging either a netbook or a really good tablet. And of course it should be easy and not take 1000000000000000000 hours of sun to charge. Anyone who has REAL experience with this type of equipment ? Best to be weather resistant as well;

 

The biggest thing to remember is that the higher your power requirements are, the more weight you are going to carry and the more money you will be spending to meet those power requirements.

There are a lot of decent to good solar chargers out there. Google/Bing will pull out all kinds of options. PowerFilm is one well thought of name brand.

Most of the good solar chargers also have an option to pull power from a car cig lighter. The more power input options you have the likelier you are to get a good charge.

When I'm out on a long trip, I tend to use a pair of very high capacity 'universal' rechargeables that in turn power my portable electronics. One of those are connected to the solar charger (or 12v automotive input) at all times. Alternatively you can double up on the batteries for each of your devices and keep the spares on charge.

The next time I'm on a long-ish backcountry trip I will be bringing a pair of solar panels along for redundancy.

Another gadget I bring along on trips is a standalone/self contained portable storage device (PSD: combo hard drive/card reader). These are pretty small devices and can be charged a lot easier/faster than a laptop. I dump my DSLR memory cards every day to the portable hard drive and often don't bother with the laptop at all.

Which brings us to the issue of a laptop. Are you sure that you're going to need a full laptop? Think long and hard about the whys of a laptop and whether or not a smaller machine (netbook/tablet) along with one of those PSD hard drives is 'good enough'.

Examples of those PSDs can be seen at: http://mydigitaldiscount.com/portable-storage-devices

BH Photo carries a huge variety of PSDs as well: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/buy/Stand-Alone-Data-Storage/ci/3369/N/4291085492

Archos makes a set of tablets with decently sized internal hard drives. Look at the current Archos Gen9 tablets (8 and 10 inch models) with 250Gb drives as well as their 5 series multimedia players. Many of the Archos machines include a GPS receiver. Specs of their new G9 8 inch tablet are at: http://www.archos.com/products/gen9/archos_80g9/specs.html?country=us&lang=en

Thomas Distributing is a great source for all kinds of batteries and chargers: http://www.thomasdistributing.com/Small-Electronics-Solar-Chargers_c_803.html

 

what is the intensity of sunlight in a jungle

seriously, agree with newposter that may be you can think about alternative like smart phone(not for the phone/network function but its reduced screen size, slow CPU with low standby power requirement yet can do most things). Then your solar charger may not need to be that huge.

 

Thanks for the info very much appreciated. OK well I do not need a full laptop, I went with a netbook last time but 5-6 hours of battery was not enough. The problem is I simply do not have electricity every day, though since they put some towers on the Amazon river I can just catch a 3G network for necessary mails. So well a keyboard is handy since I do need to take notes etc ... but that PSD looks good since then I can run more video. I was looking at the Eee transformer tablet with dock as it has 2 batteries when docked but very small 32 GB HDD. Can get it with 3G however. Will look at your recommendation re solar powerfilm. I have friends that have tried a few and they just did not have enough juice for anything but a laptop. What would be an example of a universal charger ? When there is electricity I can get it in a few places at a particular camp, so I could plug in at 2 locations ?

 

Asus UL30 can get like 12 hours on battery. Solar charger makes sense though. Seems there's some decent ones on Amazon, at least for a lower power device like a netbook or small tablet.