I'm flying a 12 hour long haul overnight flight next week. I'd like to read my e-books on my iPad retina as don't ever sleep on planes and as it's backlit, I can read without turning on the overhead light (which annoys people who refuse to wear their eye masks )
I'm in economy class which doesn't have any chargers.
Can anyone recommend a portable charger (small) that would do the job? Presume you just use the normal charging cable with it? thanks

You may not need it, your not going to read the entire flight, so say 8hrs. You might find a full charge will last, as long as it's just reading and not video etc. I know when I travel to the US I can watch 3/4 films with no problems on my iPad 3.

Check seatguru, lots of planes now have in seat charging.

If not I use a Anker charge, its about the size of a small portable USB drive and this should almost double the run time of your iPad

http://www.amazon.co.uk/13000mAh-Por...HJW/ref=sr_1_3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRklyfRKyjA

I have one of these as a reserve charger - it is essentially a battery pack which you charge up at normal USB rates. You need to ensure that such packs can cope with the high iPad current drain (this one can!)

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/12000mAh-P...item2a2c28b347

I just bought the 15000mAh version of this and it's great (although a little heavy)

thanks. What power charger do I need for an iPad, to last say 2 hours or so? I'm hoping no movies - rather relying on the airline for that. But I need one as light as possible.
Def no power charging in economy class as I checked seatguru.

To fully charge an iPad you would need one of the higher capacity Ankers which can be quite heavy. I have the 10000mah one which isn't that heavy and would probably give some charge to an iPad, probably not full but enough for what you are asking for...

My iPad mini usually lasts a total of 13 - 15 hours on a full charge. I would think that in airplane mode (i.e. wi-fi switched off) it should last a bit longer.

However, to answer the question, I was given a power bank made by Hipstreet for Xmas. After charging it, I simply reversed the charging cable, since it had the same mini-USB as my phone.

This turned out to be a mistake, and gave peculiar results, to the point that I had to remove and replace the phone's battery.

I emailed the manufacturer, who told me that I had to use my device's own charger. I tried this, and it worked.

The power bank (or whatever the correct name is) is quite small, about the size and shape of a packet of Spangles.

I flew BA last month and the ways i could charge depended on whether it was first class or not. Make sure you have cables to charge from either USB or your destination socket type ie US mains.

As mentioned iPad mini should do at least 10 to 12 hours without charge.

The 13000mAh charger will charge it around 80% so you should be able to use the device for around 20 hours in total.

thanks. It's an iPad Air, if that makes any difference.
I'm going economy class on Virgin. Some old plane that gets awful reviews including how the in flight entertainment often doesn't work. Wish I'd paid a bit more and was going BA.

Another vote for the Ankers. I have the Astro 3 which is 12000 mAh and will fully charge your iPad at least once, possibly twice. It also has a 'Smart' socket which charges the iPad a regular rate rather than a trickle charge which is what you get off of most laptop USB sockets.

Ignore that. I've flown often with Virgin and the service is great. On the one occasion I flew long haul with BA, they ran out of water half way across the Atlantic.

thanks grumpyoldbat, but seatguru informs me that the plane is old and has the oldest possible IFE where there are only a few old films and those are on a fixed loop not on demand (IF your seat back TV works at all....). It's an A340-300, Cape Town to London route. Reviews say if the person in front puts their seat back (on a 12 1/2 hr flight that'll happen most of the way) you can't see the TV screen anyhow.

2 of us travelling and possibly 2 iPads, but seems that if you rent or buy a movie (most likely rent) off iTunes, that you can't share it between more than one iPad??! Unless I've read it wrong, you can't share rented movies but have to choose which Apple device you want it on. Is that right?

Of course you can ... each of you watch a film and then swap iPads. Unless you can watch a rented movie only once.

A better approach might be to download BBC TV programmes from iPlayer. In theory you can do the same with 4oD, but it didn't work when I tried it. Admittedly, that was six months ago.

A little off topic but in the good old days if you went virgin upper class you were given a portable mini cassette video player with about a 6 in screen. Many films to choose from their cassette library (plus champagne of course). That was service!

cattle class for moi

I've ordered an Anker 13000. Thanks for your help everyone.

The Anker - iPad Air is def 2amp as it says in the manual? I'm charging it currently via the iPad wall charger. I watched the youtube video, his S3 is 1 amp so I guess my nexus 4 is too (nothing marked on the official charger)?
When the iPad is going flat, should I just plug it in and continue to watch a movie on the iPad, or should I let it charge it for an hour or 2?
Security don't freak about taking chargers on flights do they?

When the battery is running low, just plug it into the battery pack. I've taken mine on several flights and I've had no issues at all. I even took a second one on holiday at Christmas which was a gift for a friend. He loves it.

What plane is it? Virgin did a refit on most of their aircraft only 18 months or so ago.

I don't think you need to bring up with a juicy external battery as it will be quite heavy. I have had a flight about 10 hours and my retina ipad mini runs for 4 and more hours. If you do wish to get an external battery, I have a RavPower 10400mAh and it will suits your needs. 2 outputs, so you can charge your phone or your tab. You may take a look at this one from amazon if you like.

Not sure what you mean by quite heavy. The 13000 model weighs 300g and fits into the palm of your hand.

I had the temerity to add to my 200 songs and 300 photos with 6 rented iTunes SD movies to add to the one I already own which is on the iPad. It says it's too full to download the last one, but has of course docked my iTunes account.
It's a 32 GB ipad. Videos it says nearly 11GB (not including the one it refused to download). There's an Other showing 2.2GB but I believe I can't get rid of that without doing a Restore which I'm not going to to.
I've been deleting infrequently used apps and have turned off the damn iCloud.
Just 6 SD movies?! Underwhelmed....

Yeah, the file sizes are usually around 1-1.5GB a piece for SD, and more for HD. They eat up memory.

If you're going to have access to wifi at the other end, download some of them at this end, and then remove those when you've watched them, and load on the others from iTunes in the Cloud whilst on wifi whilst you're there. That way you'll have some for the return journey.

The "other" you mention is likely to be application data - e.g. Facebook, Twitter caches. If you go to Settings > General > Usage and then wait for the 'Storage' section to load you'll be able to see which apps are using the most space. You might be able to remove some of them and then reinstall some to claim back some space!