Are all battery banks built the same? - Head to head ~5000 mAh Showdown!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
1,501 words · ~7 min read
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portable power Banks once a novel mobile
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accessory offered by just a few companies that let you top up the juice
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in your phone when you were on the go now a commodity I mean seriously who and
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their dog doesn't have one of these with their branding on it so dbrand offered
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to sponsor an investigation by us into
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whether there is a difference between name brand battery Banks and well less
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name name brand battery
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Banks D Brand's custom configurator lets
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you pick out exactly the skin you want for your device even if you have frankly
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awful taste check out the link in the video description to learn more like any
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commodity category where there's massive competition there is a huge variety of
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solution that Brands cook up to try to differentiate their battery unit from
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all the others some of it is purely aesthetic rhinestones cool printed
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graphics and the like but there are also some additional features ranging from
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kind of neat to very smart that you can watch for battery charge status
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indicators that range from a series of LEDs to a full-on LCD display onboard
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flashlights ruggedized or even water resistant housings buil built-in solar
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cells for charging the bank itself more numerous more powerful or more versatile
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outputs you can get ones that start your car and we have some with 5 12 or 19
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volt output for laptop or camera equipment charging and another one with
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an AC wall style plug and more ergonomic
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form factors like the ever popular cases
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popularized by Mofi that have battery Banks built into them but we are keeping
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the scope of today's video fairly narrow
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and we won't be comparing any of that stuff we're going to focus instead on
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the main factor that consumers consider when comparing One battery Bank to
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another the capacity expressed in milliamp hours or Mah of the bank this
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is what tells you since the unit of measurement here is the same as the
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battery capacity of your device how many charges or partial charges you can
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expect out of a given bank before you need to top it up but how honest are
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manufacturers about this sort of thing well that's where dbrand this video
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sponsor comes in to find out they provided us with six identical iPhone SE
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complete with their high quality vinyl skins of course and a budget to go
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shopping for battery Banks so it was off to Amazon I went I wanted
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representatives from the main brands that our viewers are buying so I sent
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out a tweet asking for suggestions and I ended up settling on ankor Mofi churo AI
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zi and the cheapest no-name one that I
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could possibly find which ended up taking so long to ship here from China
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it delayed production of this video by a few weeks then it was a matter of
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deciding on a capacity that would be relatively easy to test so no 20,000
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milliamp hour behemoths that would require 10 full Cycles but not so small
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that we wouldn't be able to differentiate between the margin of error of our experiment and a
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significantly lower real world capacity
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while also being available across all
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these different brands and that ended up being a pretty tall order I settled on a
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churro grip 2 rated at 5200 milliamp hours an anchor second generation Astro
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rated at 6,400 milliamp hours an AI
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lipstick style rated at 5,000 milliamp hours a Mofi Power Station Duo rated at
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6,000 Milah hours a zi silver Power Bank rated at 5,000 milahs and finally this
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gem from Allegient I they were trying to spell elegant in all
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caps that is rated at uh 5600 milliamp
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hours I know that they're not all the same but we can factor in the different
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advertised capacities when we interpret our results higher capacity Banks should
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last proportionally longer than the lower capacity ones so let's introduce
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our testing methodology before beginning all phones were drained and the battery
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Banks were were charged we then plugged in all the phones with a camera running
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to monitor the experiment once all the phones were charged that run was
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finished the phones were unplugged then left with their flashlights running to
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drain their batteries for the next round and after repeating this a few times
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there are a couple of interesting results to report so these are the raw
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numbers showing how many recharge cycles each battery managed on the iPhone SE
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some of this is as expected top tier
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Brands like Mofi deliver the goods if you're willing to pay for them and
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second tier brands are almost as good
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but beware no name our Cheapo one didn't
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even manage to meet our expectations that it would be a bit worse than a
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brand name one it didn't charge the iPhone SE a single time I mean at this
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point I feel like I should be glad it didn't light on fire now here are the
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same measurements presented slightly differently by using the strongest
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performer as a baseline we can actually
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adjust all the others to see what their relative real capacity is versus their
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advertised capacity and then here are
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the numbers presented a third different way now we're looking at the actual
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amount of phone charging that you get per dollar for these Solutions using us
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prices at the time of editing together this video pretty neat huh now there are
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some additional considerations the Keen among you have probably noticed that
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given the iPhone se's meager battery size none of these Chargers seem to be
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delivering the manufacturer's claims but
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that ignores that the iPhone SE are actually on and operating while the
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experiment is running we preferred this approach as it allowed us to avoid
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interacting with the phones during the test varying screen on time would be
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quite damaging to our results which leads us then to the concl us while this
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investigation isn't the Beall and endall
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of battery Bank quality assessment I mean we didn't discharge and recharge
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each of them 500 times or test across 10
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different iPhone SE per model of battery bank or anything like that I'd consider
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it good enough to be you know plus or minus let's say 5 to 10% to tell us what
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sort of the best initial quality is if we're to make a comparison to the
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automotive industry so if nothing else it gives us a look into the measurement
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and validation practices of these particular brands on these fairly
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similar products and what we learned then is that if you're buying from a
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reputable brand it's hard to go very wrong but if something seems too good to
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be true like this one it probably is
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speaking of too good to be true dbrand lets you
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visualize what your phone's going to look like with one of their High quality
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vinyl skins before you have to place an order you select your device whether
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it's a phone or they've even got MacBooks and PC laptops including Dell's
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XPS line on there or a game controller or a game console and then you pick out
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all the different surfaces and you can mix and match different skins whether
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you want something that you know doesn't clash and actually looks good together
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or whether you want something completely out to lunch like that iPhone SE that we
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showed off at the beginning of the video their price are reasonable they ship
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worldwide and they're just generally Good Guys we've been working with them
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for a long time so if you're interested in checking out a dbrand skin all you
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got to do is hit that link in the video description and skin up your device it
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looks better and protects it from incidental scrapes and scratches at the
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same time so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do
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