Mimoco kickstarts adorable smartphone batteries

Mimoco, known for its adorable licensed-character USB sticks, has taken to Kickstarter with a new character-based gadget: a 5200mAh backup smartphone battery.

Smartphone batteries, as most of you will be aware, aren't the most capacious things. The iPhone 5s only has a 1570mAh battery, the Samsung Galaxy S4 sports 2600mAh, the new Nexus 5 is packing 2300mAh and the LG G2 has 3000mAh. Most, however, are lucky to give you a day's worth of battery — two if you're really lucky and don't use it much.

If you want some emergency power, you can grab an external battery pack, and about the biggest external battery available for portable gadgets right now comes in at 5200mAh (that is, if you don't want a brick weighing down your bag). However, they're not exactly the most exciting gadgets. Useful, yes; but, like external hard drives, they don't exactly fire anyone up.

Mimoco is attempting to do to external batteries what it has done to USB sticks: dressing them up in cutesy characters — some licensed, some Mimoco created — with what the company is calling the MimiPower BatteryBot. It has taken to Kickstarter with a range of super-cute character batteries that you can get for a pledge of just US$50, and that's not a bad deal, considering the RRP will be between US$70 and US$80.

The lithium-ion battery pack will have a base capacity of 5200mAh (which can fully charge most smartphones three times on a single charge), looking to increase to 6000mAh for all backers if the project receives enough funding, with a life cycle of 500 full charges and five standard cables included: Apple 30-pin and Lightning, micro USB, mini USB and Nokia. The character's little feet will also have LEDs in them that glow blue, green, yellow and red to indicate how much power is left inside.

Initially, 10 characters created by Mimoco will be available from the company's Animal Critterz and Core Series collections, including a Kickstarter exclusive, Terry Le Bat. The company will also be looking to license characters, and Kickstarter backers will help to choose which licence to seek first, with characters including Bender, Catbug, Pikachu, Totoro and the TARDIS.

You can find out more on the Kickstarter page. Head over to check it out and pledge your support.