Here's the best way to keep your smartphone charged when you're off the grid

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AnkerIf you often need to charge your smartphone on the go, you should buy a USB battery pack. This isn’t breaking news — they come in varying sizes for varying needs, they’re exceedingly simple to use, and you can find many decent ones for relatively cheap.

If you’re often out in the wild, though, or if you want to better prepare yourself for potential power outages, it may be worth supplementing that battery pack with a USB solar charger. As you can guess, these things harness the energy of the sun, then convert it into juice your USB-based device can use.

For those interested in this tech, the Anker PowerPort Solar Lite is worth a look. It’s very compact for a solar charger, measuring a foot and a half when sprawled out — many of these go well over two feet — and weighing just under 0.8 pounds. For something you may plant on your back for the duration of a hike, that’s important.

Despite that small footprint, the PowerPort Solar Lite can still bring in enough power to refill a phone or tablet without too much annoyance. Solar chargers are almost inherently finicky, since cloud cover is enough to temporarily bring their charge to a crawl, but the Anker can fully refill a smartphone over the course of a sunny day.

The Wirecutter (unsurprisingly) found that the 2.1A charge speeds Anker advertises shouldn’t be taken at face value, but noted the whole thing was still speedier than most competitors, and gave the device its general recommendation. And for what it’s worth, we’ve found Anker to be a very dependable manufacturer of charging accessories in the past. Either way, the PowerPort Solar Lite comes with an 18-month warranty.

Again, this is a niche device for niche cases, and you should still have a portable battery on hand for, well, night. But for outdoorsy types, there’s good value here.

Anker PowerPort Solar Lite, $49.99, available at Amazon.

This article was originally published on 3/21/2016.