portable power Banks once a novel mobile
accessory offered by just a few companies that let you top up the juice
in your phone when you were on the go now a commodity I mean seriously who and
their dog doesn't have one of these with their branding on it so dbrand offered
to sponsor an investigation by us into
whether there is a difference between name brand battery Banks and well less
name name brand battery
Banks D Brand's custom configurator lets
you pick out exactly the skin you want for your device even if you have frankly
awful taste check out the link in the video description to learn more like any
commodity category where there's massive competition there is a huge variety of
solution that Brands cook up to try to differentiate their battery unit from
all the others some of it is purely aesthetic rhinestones cool printed
graphics and the like but there are also some additional features ranging from
kind of neat to very smart that you can watch for battery charge status
indicators that range from a series of LEDs to a full-on LCD display onboard
flashlights ruggedized or even water resistant housings buil built-in solar
cells for charging the bank itself more numerous more powerful or more versatile
outputs you can get ones that start your car and we have some with 5 12 or 19
volt output for laptop or camera equipment charging and another one with
an AC wall style plug and more ergonomic
form factors like the ever popular cases
popularized by Mofi that have battery Banks built into them but we are keeping
the scope of today's video fairly narrow
and we won't be comparing any of that stuff we're going to focus instead on
the main factor that consumers consider when comparing One battery Bank to
another the capacity expressed in milliamp hours or Mah of the bank this
is what tells you since the unit of measurement here is the same as the
battery capacity of your device how many charges or partial charges you can
expect out of a given bank before you need to top it up but how honest are
manufacturers about this sort of thing well that's where dbrand this video
sponsor comes in to find out they provided us with six identical iPhone SE
complete with their high quality vinyl skins of course and a budget to go
shopping for battery Banks so it was off to Amazon I went I wanted
representatives from the main brands that our viewers are buying so I sent
out a tweet asking for suggestions and I ended up settling on ankor Mofi churo AI
zi and the cheapest no-name one that I
could possibly find which ended up taking so long to ship here from China
it delayed production of this video by a few weeks then it was a matter of
deciding on a capacity that would be relatively easy to test so no 20,000
milliamp hour behemoths that would require 10 full Cycles but not so small
that we wouldn't be able to differentiate between the margin of error of our experiment and a
significantly lower real world capacity
while also being available across all
these different brands and that ended up being a pretty tall order I settled on a
churro grip 2 rated at 5200 milliamp hours an anchor second generation Astro
rated at 6,400 milliamp hours an AI
lipstick style rated at 5,000 milliamp hours a Mofi Power Station Duo rated at
6,000 Milah hours a zi silver Power Bank rated at 5,000 milahs and finally this
gem from Allegient I they were trying to spell elegant in all
caps that is rated at uh 5600 milliamp
hours I know that they're not all the same but we can factor in the different
advertised capacities when we interpret our results higher capacity Banks should
last proportionally longer than the lower capacity ones so let's introduce
our testing methodology before beginning all phones were drained and the battery
Banks were were charged we then plugged in all the phones with a camera running
to monitor the experiment once all the phones were charged that run was
finished the phones were unplugged then left with their flashlights running to
drain their batteries for the next round and after repeating this a few times
there are a couple of interesting results to report so these are the raw
numbers showing how many recharge cycles each battery managed on the iPhone SE
some of this is as expected top tier
Brands like Mofi deliver the goods if you're willing to pay for them and
second tier brands are almost as good
but beware no name our Cheapo one didn't
even manage to meet our expectations that it would be a bit worse than a
brand name one it didn't charge the iPhone SE a single time I mean at this
point I feel like I should be glad it didn't light on fire now here are the
same measurements presented slightly differently by using the strongest
performer as a baseline we can actually
adjust all the others to see what their relative real capacity is versus their
advertised capacity and then here are
the numbers presented a third different way now we're looking at the actual
amount of phone charging that you get per dollar for these Solutions using us
prices at the time of editing together this video pretty neat huh now there are
some additional considerations the Keen among you have probably noticed that
given the iPhone se's meager battery size none of these Chargers seem to be
delivering the manufacturer's claims but
that ignores that the iPhone SE are actually on and operating while the
experiment is running we preferred this approach as it allowed us to avoid
interacting with the phones during the test varying screen on time would be
quite damaging to our results which leads us then to the concl us while this
investigation isn't the Beall and endall
of battery Bank quality assessment I mean we didn't discharge and recharge
each of them 500 times or test across 10
different iPhone SE per model of battery bank or anything like that I'd consider
it good enough to be you know plus or minus let's say 5 to 10% to tell us what
sort of the best initial quality is if we're to make a comparison to the
automotive industry so if nothing else it gives us a look into the measurement
and validation practices of these particular brands on these fairly
similar products and what we learned then is that if you're buying from a
reputable brand it's hard to go very wrong but if something seems too good to
be true like this one it probably is
speaking of too good to be true dbrand lets you
visualize what your phone's going to look like with one of their High quality
vinyl skins before you have to place an order you select your device whether
it's a phone or they've even got MacBooks and PC laptops including Dell's
XPS line on there or a game controller or a game console and then you pick out
all the different surfaces and you can mix and match different skins whether
you want something that you know doesn't clash and actually looks good together
or whether you want something completely out to lunch like that iPhone SE that we
showed off at the beginning of the video their price are reasonable they ship
worldwide and they're just generally Good Guys we've been working with them
for a long time so if you're interested in checking out a dbrand skin all you
got to do is hit that link in the video description and skin up your device it
looks better and protects it from incidental scrapes and scratches at the
same time so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do
but if it was awesome get subscribed hit the like button or even consider
supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at Amazon
instructions up there by buying a cool shirt like this one linked down there or
with a direct monthly contribution through our community Forum which is also linked down there and a pretty cool
place to just go hang out and talk Tech by the way now that you're done doing
all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click that little
button in the top right corner to check out our latest video over on channel
super fun where we oops we do things
that are a lot more fun than that