If you’re anything like me, you use your smart phone or tablet so much while you’re out and about that you are always on the verge of draining your battery. I’ve been looking around for a great, portable power source, and I’ve found a winner with EasyAcc’s iChoc 5000 Dual Port Power Bank.
With so many external batteries and power banks on the market, it can be a bit overwhelming trying to find the right one. The iChoc offers quite a few features I haven’t seen in other external batteries that drew me to it. First off, the 8-pin cable (there is a microUSB model too) is built-in and tucks away snugly into the device itself. This was key for me as my last external battery required an external cable to use and ended up being the way I killed the device.
As a bonus, the iChoc also had a second USB out port so you can actually charge another device at the same time. The iChoc comes with a microUSB cable for charging itself, but, with that nice portable small microUSB cable, I was able to charge my iPhone and my wife’s S5 without carrying around a bunch of additional cables.
As an added bonus, the iChoc has a built-in LED light for when you need an easy flashlight in a pinch. Certainly this isn’t a required feature, but if you’re in the dark and your phone is dead it might come in quite handy!
So how well does it work? I can’t speak to how long it takes to charge the pack itself–I plugged it in and let it charge overnight. It was full and ready to go in the morning. As for charging my phone itself, I let me phone get fairly low and then plugged in to the iChoc. In 40 minutes, I was able to regain 40% of my battery so about a percent a second and that was without turning anything off. In a real-world, OMG-my-phone-is-about-to-die,scenario, I usually start turning off apps and disabling wireless and Bluetooth to conserve battery life. I imagine in one of those situations, the recharge would work even better.
The iChoc is exactly the same size as my iPhone in its case. While it is bigger than some of the smaller batteries on the market, the ability to double charge and provide this much power is definitely worth it to me. And for only $23 ($18 for the microUSB version) it’s a steal in my opinion.
Note: I was given a review device but all thoughts here are my own.
