Genius ECO-u821 8000mAh Power Bank

Product: Genius 8000mAh Power Bank with Safety Protection
Provided By: Genius
Price: $44.99 MSRP (Can find much cheaper)

Introduction:

Smartphones and mobile devices are becoming more powerful and useful at an incredible rate. It seems that every generation of mobile product is leaps and bounds ahead of the past one, but one thing that doesn't increase its level of awesome at the same rate are the batteries that power these devices. At this point, I often will do a service call of a company using only a tablet or my smartphone, but unfortunately the battery life of these products can become an issue if they are required to do some 'heavy lifting'.

There are quite a few different portable power solutions on the market today, and some of them are super bulky and others are very slim - but don't offer a lot of additional power. The Genius ECO-u821 tries to be the perfect middle ground with a nice slim size, not too large of a footprint and enough power to charge your devices a few times. With a battery capacity of 8000mAh, it should be able to charge your 2000mAh phone up to four times. Of course your mileage will vary depending on your devices battery, charge level and more.

Genius has a few different power banks that offer more portability and some large ones that should be able to keep a single device going for more than a week. As I said earlier, I think the 8000mAh ECO-u821 is about the sweet spot as it is not much thicker than a phone (in a case) and offers a few extra charges.

Specifications:

What the specifications don't tell you is that in addition to the two USB ports in the device, there is also a built-in Micro-USB cable that also can be used to charge your mobile devices. In theory, you can charge up to three things at once. We'll try that out in a bit.

Closer Look:

As we take a closer look at the ECO-u821 one of the first things I noticed was the build quality. I've seen some products that felt really light and I wondered what kind of battery was inside. The ECO-u821 is pleasantly heavy, but it's not bulky or awkward. It is very similar in size to the Galaxy Note 3 in terms of length and width, but it is thicker of course. As I handled this product for the weeks that I had it at BCCHardware, I was impressed by the overall feel and quality of the build. All the seams stayed tight and even though it made quite a few trips in my laptop bag, it never seemed to be the worse for wear.

While the size is a little bit larger than some may like, I found it quite pocketable and it easily fits into your laptop or camera bag. When I'm on trips, I use my Nexus 5 to capture GPS data to merge with my photos, so it uses a fair bit of battery. Having this unit on-board means that whether I'm hiking in the mountains or covering technology at CES, I would be able to stay mobile and stay charged.

On the next page we'll take a look at some test results and finalize things in our conclusion.