I bought this product from Amazon back in January for $72. The idea was to have enough power for my trip to Japan. After searching for a while, this is the backup battery with largest capacity, yet the price is still reasonable. Reading the review in Amazon was a bit stressful. People are either very happy or very upset with this battery.
After serious consideration, I decided to try this product, with hope that if the unit is proven defective, I will return it and ask for full refund before the 90 days warranty ends. This unit arrived in February (my trip was in April). So I use the first few months using it like crazy. Using it to charge two iPhones and one iPad for daily usage. And so far I haven’t found any problem.
This battery has 5 USB ports, so it can charge up-to 5 devices simultaneously. In my trip, this was proven very useful because I use it to power 2 iPhones (mine and my wife’s), 1 iPad, one USB charger for Sony camera battery and 1 mobile Wifi router. My Japan trip was self-exploration, so I rely on my iPhone all the time for GPS location and map. One full charge of this battery got all my devices covered for 2 days !
If there’s any weakness, it’s the charging time of this battery. Charging from a blank state (totally empty) to a full charge takes super long time (more than 12 hours). While I can understand why (large capacity), this is a serious issue when using it for traveling. Most of the time we don’t have that much time to charge in hotel at night. So I did use this battery for one day (with around half of its capacity remained), then charged it back to full overnight.
On the front panel, we get an on-off switch. A button and 5 LED indicators to tell the percentage of remaining capacity. Plus a flashlight with on-off switch. I’m not sure why they feel the need to put a flashlight with a 16,000 mAh battery, perhaps to help us finding our cable inside our bag.
Some people reported fire hazard and smoke coming from this battery, even when NOT being used. In my experience using this device, the battery only got slightly warm when being charged, and can get a bit hot when used to charge multiple device. The temperature never reached a point that made me worry though. Even my iPhone can get warmer than the battery sometimes.
I have used this battery for few months now, and so far quite happy with it. My guess, this product might have problem with its quality control, resulting in many defective products actually got sold to customers. If you do decide to get it, test it thoroughly before the warranty period ends, make sure you get a good unit.
Update Aug 2013: It’s been 18 months now and this battery still works good.
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