What makes the best portable charging stations?

As smartphone use rises, so does the demand for charging points. 

Recent Joos survey findings revealed that almost a quarter of people depend on their phones for essential everyday tasks like making payments*, whilst a similar number of respondents said they regarded portable charging stations as fairly important facilities in public venues like shopping centres. 

More than 83% of customers use their phones whilst shopping and 62% are ready to scan products and read online reviews whilst they’re browsing a store. 

Smartphone use is part and parcel of shopping these days, and portable charging on site has become a growing market that numerous brands have attempted to tap into. However, few services providing charging stations have truly gotten off the ground. 

Why? Because customers need more than just a place to power up. They need a digital experience that makes charging fast, easy and convenient – rather than merely available. 

This realisation has led to a new entity called Joos – a service of portable charging stations that has proven so popular that its charging stations are accessible in many of the nation’s favorite venues. 

Joos is proving to be the nation’s choice for power solutions in a tangled marketplace. In this blog, we explain why… 

What makes Joos the best portable charging stations?

In their first guise, charging facilities were fraught with design problems. Some of these solutions were little more than frayed charging wires tethered to walls. Others were built with a locker box concept: A service where phone users would tuck their device away in a secure area and return several hours later to collect it when the battery was boosted. 

Not only were these original charging stations usually hard to find, they tended to be faulty due to irregular maintenance, they rarely presented good value for money, and were never particularly convenient. When a customer has to wait by a cable, or stash away their phone for two hours in 

a dirty, damaged box and pay a big price for the privilege, they’re basically forking out for an expensive, poor-quality, single-use plug. On top of this, venues often experienced issues dealing with customers who lost the keys to their boxes. 

The old-style charging systems failed to address the primary pain points of smartphone users and venues alike. But today, Joos has stepped in to transform the bane of portable charging into a rewarding digital experience – one that empowers customers rather than impeding them. 

The Joos service is refreshingly user-friendly (with customers simply scanning a code to access a portable battery pack) and Apple-approved, with no need to download an app to access the service. 

Every station is also fully managed by Joos experts – guaranteeing they remain operational, clean and tidy at zero expense to the business. 

There’s a solution for every type of venue – with Joos designs ranging from small countertop systems to free-standing machines in higher footfall outlets and busy shopping centres alike. 

Thanks to Joos, the problems of portable charging are a thing of the past. Switching to a better solution is simple

An increasing number of venues are choosing Joos to integrate their first portable charging stations – with sites such as Salford Royal Hospital and London Bridge train station both enjoying huge benefits after embracing Joos’ service offering. 

However, venues with existing mobile charging stations on site are also switching to Joos. One example is BrewDog – the brewery with some of the most popular bars in the world (£286m total revenue in 2021). 

BrewDog noticed that Joos features could offer potential solutions to the problems they’d experienced with a former provider – which included poor maintenance and a worrying lack of cleanliness in a post-COVID setting. 

BrewDog opted to move to Joos – the only Apple certified provider of this service – and the transformation was instant. Almost 5,000 Joos power banks have been rented by BrewDog patrons and bar staff since, with 93% using Joos chargers for up to four hours. Some even rented power banks for as long as three whole days. 

In the first three months alone, 2,597 hours of charging took place in BrewDog – translating to an increased revenue of £25,970 per year as people stayed on site, spent more, and kept returning to the bars.