The IT Nerd

I seem to be getting a lot of external batteries lately to review. The latest one is the Jackery Mini which is a lipstick sized 3200 mAh battery that is meant to give your smartphone a charge of juice when you need it. Here’s what it looks like:

It is a lightweight battery made of aluminum. It has a blue light that has four dots where four means that it is fully charged and each dot is worth 25%. It also has a button that you need to press to start charging a device.

It has a Micro USB port as well as a full sized USB port. Plug the cable of your choice (USB, Lightning, etc) in the latter port to charge your smartphone and charge the Jackery Mini with the former port using the supplied Micro USB cable. You can use a USB to AC adapter or plug it into your computer, but you’ll have to bring your own adapter if you choose the former method to charge the Jackery Mini.

It’s really, really light which means it will not weigh you down. Plus it doesn’t occupy a lot of space. That means you can fit it in your pocket or a purse. But the question is if how much can it charge? To find out, I charged it for four hours and then I performed this experiment:

• I took an iPhone 6 that was 58% charged and charged it until it was full. It took 1 hour and 25 minutes and at the end I had two dots which implied 25% – 50% charge was remaining.
• I took an iPhone 6 that was 61% charged and charged it until it was full. It took 1 hour and 17 minutes and at the end I had one blinking dot which implied less than 10% of a charge.

So in short, this experiment implies that if I had an iPhone 6 that has 20% charge, I can use the Jackery Mini to get it up to a full charge and maybe have some charge to spare in case I need a few extra minutes of power. That’s handy if you need to top off your phone after a day’s usage so that you can use it in the evening without having to look for an AC outlet. That I suspect will make the Jackery Mini a valuable piece of kit for many. It has a MSRP of $29.99 USD, but it is on sale for $12.99 – $14.99 USD at the moment depending on the color that you want as you get four to choose from. Of interest, you get a 18 month warranty which is longer than I am used to. Get your Jackery Mini direct from Jackery or on Amazon.

This entry was posted on September 16, 2015 at 8:00 am and is filed under Products with tags Jackery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.