Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Review: Anker USB Battery

After seeing this kickstarter, I knew I had to find something similar for my trip to PAX East. With the expectation that I'd be in lines or waiting for 6 hours or so a day, I knew my DS, iPod and cell phone batteries weren't going to hold up. Enter the Anker Astro 3E 10000mAh battery pack.


The first thing to note is that Anker sells their product directly through Amazon. It's currently at a steep discount, and is cheaper than the previous unit I linked at $40. Though this price lists as being on sale, this price has remained consistent for over a month.
The unit has two different USB hookups -- one configured for Android, and one configured for Apple products. it has a maximum draw of 3 amps at a time. That's enough for 1 iPad, or two phones. For PAX, I bought 2 units, expecting to be using a lot of battery, and I was unsure how long each battery would actually charge.
Day 1 was the trip in -- an 8 hour train ride. After about 2 hours, my DS battery was on empty. Rather than hooking my DS up to the power outlet, I brought out my Anker battery, and wasn't disappointed. Without emptying half of the battery, I got 6 more hours on my DS and iPod.
The actual convention became the big challenge in a way I wasn't expecting. Around 2PM each day of the con, the group I went with were all complaining about dead batteries, and I mentioned my Anker units. From then on, the batteries were supplying eight people with a large supply of battery power, and they held up. Doing about one recharge for each device people had, the batteries didn't even go below half for the entire duration.
I'm extremely pleased with my purchase. This was perhaps my best buy of all PAX.

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