Home Reviews ,,,,, Right now we can easily call it the best external battery in its class. We are talking about the 26800 PD model from Anker, a company that has tried over the years to produce good quality appliances and components at reasonable prices. In this case, we can say excellent.
After reading numerous positive reviews we wanted to test whether Anker's battery with two Usb-A ports and one Usb-C actually lives up to its fame. In short: yes, it is. Let's see the details.
The battery and package
The package has a significant weight, because the battery has relevant dimensions and weights. This is the only aspect that could be negative, but it obviously depends on the size of the cells, which in order to accumulate 26800 milliamper-hour require a fair amount of space and desity of the elements. The battery comes in a sober white box with red Anker writing, and inside it contains, in addition to the battery itself, black and metal, also a comfortable knitted “sock” to contain it (we will see its merits later) and two cables: one Usb-A and one Usb-C on both sides. There is no battery charger or Lightining-Usb-C cable which, instead, as we will see in a moment, would be strategic for us users of iOS devices.
The dimensions of the battery as mentioned are important: 16.5 x 2.3 x 7.9 cm for 576 grams of weight, with lithium-ion technology. The battery we tested had A1375 as a model number / article number. The full name is PowerCore + 26800 PD, where the acronym PD stands for Power Delivery and the + for Premium.
The technical characteristics
The battery has a device recharging function and the battery itself Power Delivery, which is the standard adopted by Apple for its new devices: smartphones and tablets as well as new laptops with Usb-C. Let's start with the first ones.
If you use the battery with an iPhone 8, 8 Plus and X, the charging times are significantly reduced thanks to the greater charging power that can be delivered via the Usb-C port. Same thing if you connect an iPad Pro in both 9.7 and 10.5 and 12.9 inch versions. For MacBooks, the thing is slightly different: the “small” MacBook, with a twelve-inch screen, is fully recharged even in operation (due to the low-power processor) while the 13 and 15-inch MacBook Pro are simply “slowed down” in discharging the internal battery, or when the machine is off or paused, they are normally recharged.
The power of the Power Delivery system therefore works like this: through the USB-C port 30W are delivered while through the 2 USB-A you can deliver 5V to 3A. With a 27W Power Delivery charger like that of the 12-inch MacBook, the battery charges in just 4.5 hours.
The monumental capacity of this device allows you to fully recharge the MacBook 12 twice, or to recharge an iPhone 8 up to nine times or an iPad Pro 10.5 four times. Let's see in practice if this is the case.
Let's charge the battery
When Anker's “monster” arrived we immediately appreciated the black and “tough” metal material it is made of. However, we also feared it, because in the stock market the risk is that of scratches on the body of an iPad or MacBook. Fortunately, Anker adds a travel bag, in perforated black synthetic material, which fits perfectly and cushions just enough to make the black monolith an object compatible with even the least structured and tidy bags on the planet.
A detail that proved very useful and important in the test is the charge level indicator with button. It is a circle of ten very light white LEDs that allow you to understand how many tenths of charge there are. Upon arrival, the battery was almost empty. We plugged it into the MacBook's power supply for the night (using the Anker cable) and the next morning to our surprise it still wasn't charged. In the following days, two or three tests have allowed us to understand that the power strip that we use next to the bed significantly decreases the power delivered and therefore the Apple power supply does not go into Power Delivery mode. Moving in the evening after recharging to a wall socket, the recharge was completed in less than the 4.5 hours required and in the following days we noticed that the battery recharges in about 3.5-4 hours.
Road test
We used the battery as a spare for the MacBook or the iPad, both in the city when going to work in a bar, and at home when you are with the computer in places where there are no nearby electrical outlets. We also used it to charge the iPhone and to charge the Apple Watch. The device also allows you to charge two iPads or an iPad and an iPhone at the same time, while we have never had the opportunity to try with three at the same time.
First let's see the number of refills. They are empirical tests, made during the days of quiet work. The MacBook tends to drain rather quickly when it is put under pressure and the presence of the battery in the backpack has changed the fate of travel. The two full charges of the MacBook are just right there and the times vary depending on the type of use you are making of the computer. If it is in sleep mode, about two and a half hours, while with the computer on on average it adds another six hours to get to a full charge (but this depends a lot on what you do).
The thing is rather more complex if we talk about phones. We tested it with our iPhone 8 Plus and here we saw charging times that change considerably: probably the use of the phone but also the amount of energy present in the battery makes the difference. In half an hour it recharges almost 80% of the battery and in less than two hours the phone is fully charged (but sometimes it bases just over an hour). The iPad Pro, on the other hand, gave more problems because it requires a rather “heavy” recharge and in half an hour you do not always reach 50%, for a full recharge it took up to three full hours, maybe something more, and never less than two and a half hours. Furthermore, there is no way of being able to make four recharges of the iPad Pro with one charge of the Anker battery, which then drops dramatically when instead you recharge multiple devices at the same time: apart from the charging times that get longer because the use of Usb-A ports evidently breaks down the Power Delivery also of the Usb-C port (while always using original Apple cables, including our Lightning-Usb-C, and those of Anker itself), the total sum of the recharges is less than what it should be able to do the drums.
Here too we have done some experiments and time measurements always in working conditions and therefore without using laboratory equipment and without spending a week of testing because we have neither the devices nor frankly the time to test a battery that manifests very clearly to have more or less the declared characteristics.
Conclusions
After using the battery around Italy, from the train to the car to public transport, we came to the conclusion that the weight is not relevant at all. Sure, it is a pretty big battery, but the half kilo and change is still in a “compact” package, made of very sturdy metal material and with a carrying bag that makes it scratch-resistant. And it seems absurd to complain about the weight since the 26800 mAh capacity is massive and necessarily requires a large container for the lithium-ion elements.
In the face of a very low price compared to the quality offered, the indication system with ten LEDs of the percentage charge level also stands out, which we find accurate and very comfortable. There is no internal power supply in the package but, if you use it in an Apple environment with a MacBook 12, this charger (or that of the Pro, but beware: not that of the iPhone and iPad) is able to give the Power Delivery charge and reduce battery charging to four hours. This is a very important feature and among other things the fact that there is no power supply for those who already have it is definitely a saving in the sense that the package costs less and you do not have to buy a duplicate.
The total number of recharges is a bit lower than we might expect from the seller's statement, but in the sense that perhaps a full charge of the four for the iPad is missing, or 1–2 recharges on the cycle of eight for the iPhone . Maybe it also depends on the type of use of the devices, because having just carried out tests not in the laboratory but in the field, the only ones capable of saying how a device actually works (and this battery works very well), the devices were switched on and working with loads of not constant work.
The battery can be bought at the moment for 69.99 euros on Amazon
Pro – Capacity exaggerated – Does what it says it does – Compact, with scratch-resistant case – Excellent 10-light LED to indicate charge
Against – Sul the behavior is not constant, but with variations within the norm – The lack of a Power Delivery charger lowers the price but creates a problem for those who do not have a MacBook 12 or Pro
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