Top 6 Things That You Need to Consider When Buying a Power Bank [Buying Guide]

A portable power bank saves you in the crucial time on the go when your smart phone gets completely drained out and you need it the most. We all know this quite well by now  with the over-popularity of this extremely useful gadget, but are you aware of the aspects which make a portable charger perfect, specifically for your exact needs? In this buying guide about power banks, let us reveal those top six points which would make you end up selecting the best power bank, giving you the optimum result.

Input Current Rating:

Whatever be the actual capacity of a portable charger, input current ratings implies how fast a power bank can charge itself up. Generally, there are two options which are widely available. 1A at 5V and 2A at 5V. Obviously 2A charges up a certain power bank much faster in comparison to 1A but in reality, most power banks come with 1A rating yielding a lazy self-charging battery pack. So keep an eye out for this spec when picking a power bank.

Output Current Rating:

Now that we have seen about the input rating, output rating also plays a vital role in charging, but this time this concerns with the device that is going to get charged by the power bank. Here also the typical figures are 1A and 2.1A at 5V but additionally, how fast the device (smartphone or tablet PC) can be charged, is dependent on the current drawing ability of the device. Generally, in case of the tablet PCs, not much trouble is seen as majority of tablets have the provision to draw power at 2.1 A at 5V but with smart phones, things get different. So it is better to check the current drawing ability of your smartphone before zeroing in on the output rating of a portable charger.

That power pulling capability could be obtained from the official wall charger that came along with your smartphone or the datasheet specs of your smartphone.

Effective Capacity of the Portable Charger:

As you can fairly easily find power banks having different capacities like 10400 mAh, 5200 mAh or 2600 mAh (most common figures). But that indicates the maximum power retention ability of a power bank and not the maximum power delivering capacity.

To make it simple, a power bank having 12000 mAh specified capacity will never be able to completely charge your 2000 mAh smart phone six times. There is always some loss due to energy conversion, quality of the connecting cable, health of your smartphone batteries and some more detailed technical issues. In a nutshell, the majority of the portable chargers are able to covert nearly 75% of the total specified capacity.

So while calculating and evaluating the number of possible charges by a certain power bank, you should keep this tricky point in mind, as all of the power bank manufacturers avoid mentioning this real fact.

Portability:

There goes a pervasive misconception regarding the capacity of a portable charger that more the power, better is the result. It is a partial truth as definitely a bigger capacity power bank will be able to charge a certain smart phone more times, but at the same time it becomes bulkier in size & weight, thus defeating the very fundamental trait of a portable charger, which should be to remain convenient to carry with you all the time. So be scrupulous and prevent getting allured by the capacity of a power bank. After all it should be portable and it is not a home inverter!

Types of the battery cells:

Portable battery packs come with two kinds of battery cells, namely Li-ion and Li-poly cells. They indicate the type and built material of the battery cells, which in turn comprises the power bank. Now Li-ions overhaul Li-poly easily in number for being cheap, but there are certain advantages of Li-poly like being much safer than Li-ion, having high energy-space density, producing sleeker power banks. So both have their pros and cons, it depends on your budget mainly. If you have a tighter budget, then Li-ion is best option to go for, in other way, Li-Poly would be wiser to choose.

Brand:

With the growing number of counterfeit and fake power banks nowadays, it requires a special mention to only go for the trusted and tested portable charger brands. There are literally endless manufacturers selling power banks but most of them compromises the safety aspects for aiming to make easy profits.

Wrapping it up:

Buying any power bank could lead to you getting into some issues, which result in you not getting the optimum device for your needs. Thus it is always better to be aware of the aspects and by using this guide we hope you can find the power bank that right for you.

This guest post was written by Aditya, a tech enthusiastic and blogger at Powerbanky, who writes about the latest gadgets and geek stuff. Other than blogging he enjoys listening to Eminem and watching soccer.