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Wednesday, February 25, 2015

I won’t go without juice ever again. Bought a portable battery life.

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In the previous post, I wrote that I decided to buy a portable mobile charger for my Nexus 5 and a Backbeat Go 2 Bluetooth headset.

So what did I buy?

I decided that I would not need more than 10,000mAH capacity. When I checked the products available on Amazon, there were couple of larger batteries within my budget as well. Still, they were a bit more expensive than the 10,000mAH ones, so I decided to stick to my original plan. Unfortunately, none of the brand were familiar to me because this is the first time I've been in the market for a portable mobile charger. I couldn’t find any legitimate reviews either.

I was lost.

Finally I had to take a risk. Since I am buying from Amazon, I can return it within a month if I am not satisfied with the product. But that doesn’t mean I can test them all one by one and return all until I find the best one.

I had to pick a good enough charger, with the information I had at hand. I figured that

  • the price,
  • the build quality from the listed pics on Amazon’s product listing (unless I could locate it on the manufacturer’s website),
  • state of Amazon reviews and
  • the originating country

would be a reasonable set of criteria the base my decision on.

After filtering based on the above criteria, there were couple that stood out from the rest (this and this), but I finally settled on the latter because it had 20% -off time-sale, making it cheaper and the former seemed made out of cheap plastic. I managed to buy it within seconds away from the conclusion of the time-sale. In total, I spent JPY 3,190 as it was originally JPY 3,990. Actually, the original MSRP was JPY 9,990. I am curious as to why it was going so cheaply.

Still, most of the stuff I’ve bought from Amazon have been like that. The actual price had been way less than the original Japanese MSRP.

Here are some information about the unit.

  • It has an aluminum body. I wish it wasn't. It feels as if it can be easily scratched. They probably should have bundled cloth cover with the package.
  • It's got a 10,000mAH battery. That's good for about 4 full charges of the Nexus 5, which has a 2300mAH battery.
  • There are two charging outputs - one with 2.1A output and the other with 1A output. I will use the former for the phone and the latter for the wireless headset.
  • The battery is charged by an Micro-USB port. Although a Micro-USB cable is bundled with the charger, there is no wall-charger.
  • It has a 4-LED indicator to reveal the amount of charge left. When charging, it blinks the corresponding LED to indicate the progress. For example, if we are at more than 50% and less than 75%, the first two LEDs will be fully lit up and the 3rd LED will be blinking. The 4th LED will be off.
  • There is a power button to start charging the devices. I'm not sure how to stop charging though. Perhaps a long press would do the trick.

Finally, some photos of the actual product.


I, of course, haven’t tested it properly yet, so there might be issues that I am still unaware of. I will definitely report back if I come across any. Hopefully, there will be none as I don’t want to go through the hassle of packing back.

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