When listener and friend Sandy Foster was going on an extensive trip a year or so ago, she and I got chatting about how to easily charge an Apple Watch while on the go. Slapping an Apple Watch onto a magnetic puck on a table is pretty simple, but if you’re on an International flight, plugging the puck into power and keeping the watch stable on the tray table as the cable tries to pull it onto the floor is a bit challenging.
She found a great solution for her trip — a tiny battery pack with a built-in Apple Watch charging puck. I thought that was a swell solution but I never bought one for myself. When we were getting ready to go to CES, I saw a deal from one of the big Mac sites for a battery-powered Apple Watch charger and I thought it was time to pull the trigger. I followed the link, and it looked pretty good, but it used micro-USB for charging. That was a deal killer.
I went hunting on Amazon and found a battery-based Apple Watch charger that I liked much better. A company called HUOTO sells a 1200mAh Apple Watch charger for only $19 that charges over USB-C, and it even comes with a USB-C to USB-A cable.
This little battery pack is adorable. It’s two inches square and 5/8” thick with nice rounded corners and only weighs 1.7oz (49g). It has a small leather loop on it with an easy-to-open ring to attach it to a purse or backpack. I’m not big on hooking things on my purse so I might remove the ring just to save another couple of grams.
I bought the purple one with little sprinkles on it, because, why not? You can buy it in boring black or white, or choose one of the other fun colors like baby blue, dark green, or peach. There’s even one that looks like someone spilled a bunch of different colors of paint on it. With twelve colors to choose from, there’s bound to be one you would like.
My one concern was whether the watch would stick to the battery well enough when struggling in an airplane seat. I’m happy to report that I can pick up the watch and the battery stays stuck to it.
To start charging, there’s a very tiny button right next to the USB-C charging port. A single press turns it on, and a glowing ring lights up to show you it’s ready. If your battery is charged to more than 66%, it will glow green. If it’s 33-65%, it will glow blue. If it’s down to 32% or lower, the ring will glow red. I think that’s pretty fancy for a little $19 charger.
If you want to manually turn it off, you can double-click the button. It will also turn itself off automatically after a few minutes if no Apple Watch is charging on it.
The Amazon page for the HUOTO wireless Apple Watch charger says it will charge your Apple Watch 1-1.5 times. That sounded great, and I wanted to test it to see if it lived up to the promise. It’s challenging and time-consuming to do a perfect experiment, but I think the results of my imperfect test are still revealing.
I have the 42mm Series 10 Apple Watch (the smaller one), and I drained it to 13% and then put it on the HUOTO charger, which was charged to 100%. In a couple of hours, my watch was fully charged. Most importantly, the light only went from green down to blue, which means it still had between 33-65% of its own charge left. My watch had gained 87% of a charge, but I wondered how much more was left.
Rather than spend another day draining my own watch, we decided to use what was left to charge Steve’s 46mm Series 10 Apple Watch. His was at 48% when he started, and the HUOTO charged it to 80%. At this point, the HUOTO had gone from blue to red, which meant it had less than 33% left. We suspect that it stopped charging because of the battery-saving option that stops the watch from charging at 80% because the HUOTO was not yet empty.
In any case, the HUOTO added 32% to his watch and 87% to mine, for a total of 119%. I know these are two different battery sizes for the two watches, so this is an imperfect experiment, but the test gave me confidence that I’ll be able to fully recharge my Apple Watch without issue from this tiny sub $20 wireless battery charger.
With our trip to Japan coming up next week, I’m excited to have this much better solution to charging my watch while on the plane during the red-eye flight, and Steve decided he needed one, too.