If you’re always on the go like me, it can be hard to keep your cell phone battery always charged up, especially if you have a smart phone and use it a lot. It can be frustrating when you near the end of the day and you have to start worrying about getting your phone to a charger or not being able to receive that important call, email or text.

My first attempt at combating this issue was to buy a portable battery that I could plug a USB cable into and charge my phone off of. This worked good and got the job done, but the problem was that I then had to carry both a battery and a USB cable. I tried buying a retracting cable, but I found that they don’t have the throughput needed to charge a phone very fast. Getting frustrated I decided to do a search and found the best solution, the Anker Travel Charger with Replacement Batteries!

The Anker Travel Charger can charge your phone and a repla’cement battery at the same time either by plugging the charger into the wall or a via USB cable plugged into a car charger.  Since my wife and I both have the Galaxy S 2, it was a great tool to have to make sure we always had a spare battery available if we needed one.  Since a replacement battery is smaller than a portable battery and USB cable, it’s much easier to carry it around.  One downside to having a replacement battery versus a portable battery charger is that you have to remove the dead battery and put the charged battery back in.  Though, this isn’t much of a downside.  Another downside of the charger is that since it’s universal you have to move the connectors to the proper +/- position in order to charge the battery, which can sometimes get misaligned if you aren’t careful.

I also did find that I could buy replacement batteries that held a longer charge than the original batteries that came with my Galaxy S 2.  The 2200mAH batteries from Anker lasted about 50% longer than the OEM battery.  So that’s another plus as well!  Here’s a picture of the charger and the replacement batteries: