If you’re the kind of person who will arrive at the airport without charging your phone or laptop, you are also the kind of person who will forget to charge the battery bank in your smart luggage. I discovered this when a three-hour delay kicked off my weekend trip with Incase’s NoviConnected carry-on suitcase. Sorry, but it’s true.
At home, it took six hours of wall charging at home to get the NoviConnected’s 10,050-mAh battery up to 100%. A few days later, I packed my bag, headed to the airport and waited at the gate. By the time I realized I needed to charge my phone, the suitcase’s battery had gone down to 76% after doing nothing, with an estimated one hour and 23 minutes’ worth of juice.
Charging my phone back up to 80% took the suitcase’s battery down to 19%. What about charging a laptop? Forget about it. The bag’s battery bank is strictly for small devices only and it’s best conserved for an emergency situation. Since everything from your boarding pass to your hotel reservation is on your phone, you’ll need that to be juiced up, so it’s not a total loss. Like the rest of the bag’s smart features, it may promise more than it can actually deliver.
For example, take the suitcase’s Smart Luggage tracker. It uses Bluetooth and has a range of up to 33 feet. On a full flight, I ended up checking my carry-on at the airline’s request. When I got to baggage claim, I glanced at the Incase app to determine my luggage’s whereabouts and found out that my bag was out of range. For fifteen minutes, I waited at the baggage carousel like an ordinary plebe, trapped in a seemingly endless purgatory, mired in...