Last weekend my brother Tim and his family came to Boston for a visit. I thought Tim and I were about neck and neck with our gadget collections, but when I saw him take this out of his backpack my jaw dropped. It was love at first sight.

In his hands, Tim held the answer to one of my biggest challenges-how to power a nearly dead cell phone when there’s no outlet in sight.

If I owned one of these, I would have a power backup for my iPhone no matter where I went. I could just plug it in and be good to go for another four hours.

Tim works for Energizer. And so, after a couple of well-placed sisterly sighs, he handed it over to me. Thanks Timmy!  

I know this is a little old fashioned, given all the digital storage space we now have in the “cloud”, but sometimes I just want to hold my data in my hands!

A big fan for years, I use my Iomega portable hard drive to back up my music, my photos and move big files between computers. The price point always stays around $110 and every year they just add more and more space.