Better Re Kickstarter wants to give new life to old batteries

Fancy a little extra battery life to top up your smartphone with? Better Re, which recently passed its Kickstarter goal of $50,000, wants to make use of your old spare batteries by turning them into a portable power pack that you can use with your other gadgets.

Better Re apparently works with a range of battery sizes, supports two battery connection types and can be used to charge any gadget that draws power from a USB connection. The chassis also features a clip to hold different sized batteries into place, a charging port, and an LED to tell you how much capacity remains in your old battery.

Although the early bird Kickstarter packages are gone, you can still grab a basic pack and USB cable for $49, or a double pack with engraving for $69. If you don’t happen to have any spare batteries around to use, Better Re will also sell you a used battery with a capacity somewhere in the region of 2800-3400mAh for $10.

The company suggests that smartphone batteries are still up to 80 percent efficient even after two years of use, which is usually when customers will trade in for a new phone anyway. Instead of throwing your old battery in the trash, Better Re thinks that we should make use of them to power our newer gadgets.

The only real problem with the idea is that external battery packs with much larger capacities are already available for much cheaper than the Better Re. Not to mention that there’s usually a load of offers on these type of items too. With that in mind, this is definitely more of a product for the eco-warriors rather than the scrooges out there.

Even so, if you have a few spare batteries lying around that no longer fit in your new smartphone, Better Re will enable you use them to charge all your latest gadgets.