 Portable power banks once a novel mobile accessory offered by just a few companies that let you top up the juice in your phone when you were on the go. Now a commodity. I mean seriously who and their dog doesn't have one of these with their branding on it. So dbrand offered to sponsor an investigation by us into whether there is a difference between name-brand battery banks and well less name-brand battery banks. dbrand's custom configurator lets you pick out exactly the skin you want for your device even if you have frankly awful taste. Check out the link in the video description to learn more. Like any commodity category where there's massive competition there is a huge variety of solutions that brands cook up to try to differentiate their battery unit from all the others. Some of it is purely aesthetic. Rhinestones, cool printed graphics and the like but there are also some additional features ranging from kind of neat to very smart that you can watch for. Battery charge status indicators that range from a series of LEDs to a full-on LCD display. Onboard flashlights, ruggedized or even water resistant housings, built-in solar cells for charging the bank itself, more numerous more powerful or more versatile outputs. You can get ones that start your car and we have some with 512 or 19 volt output for laptop or camera equipment charging and another one with an AC wall style plug and more ergonomic form factors like the ever popular cases popularized by Mophie that have battery banks built into them. But we are keeping the scope of today's video fairly narrow and we won't be comparing any of that stuff. We're going to focus instead on the main factor that consumers consider when comparing one battery bank to another. The capacity expressed in milliamp hours or MAH of the bank. This is what tells you since the unit of measurement here is the same as the battery capacity of your device how many charges or partial charges you can expect out of a given bank before you need to top it up. But how honest are manufacturers about this sort of thing? Well, that's where dbrand this video sponsor comes in. To find out they provided us with six identical iPhone SE's complete with their high quality vinyl skins of course and a budget to go shopping for battery banks. So it was off to Amazon I went. I wanted representatives from the main brands that our viewers are buying so I sent out a tweet asking for suggestions and I ended up settling on Anker, Mophie, Chiro, Aki, Xiaomi and the cheapest no-name one that I could possibly find which ended up taking so long to ship here from China. It delayed production of this video by a few weeks. Then it was a matter of deciding on a capacity that would be relatively easy to test so no 20,000 milliamp hour behemoths that would require 10 full cycles but not so small that we wouldn't be able to differentiate between the margin of error of our experiment and a significantly lower real-world capacity while also being available across all these different brands and that ended up being a pretty tall order. I settled on a Chiro Grip 2 rated at 5200 milliamp hours, an Anker second generation Astro rated at 6400 milliamp hours, an Aki lipstick style rated at 5000 milliamp hours, a Mophie power station duo rated at 6000 milliamp hours, a Xiaomi silver power bank rated at 5000 milliamp hours and finally this gem from Allegiant, I think they were trying to spell elegant in all caps that is rated at 5600 milliamp hours. I know that they're not all the same but we can factor in the different advertised capacities when we interpret our results. Higher capacity banks should last proportionally longer than the lower capacity ones. So let's introduce our testing methodology. Before beginning all phones were drained and the battery banks were charged. We then plugged in all the phones with a camera running to monitor the experiment. Once all the phones were charged that run was finished, the phones were unplugged then left with their flashlights running to drain their batteries for the next round. And after repeating this a few times there are a couple of interesting results to report. So these are the raw numbers showing how many recharge cycles each battery managed on the iPhone SE. Some of this is as expected. Top tier brands like Mophie deliver the goods if you're willing to pay for them and second tier brands are almost as good. But beware no name. Our cheapo one didn't even manage to meet our expectations that it would be a bit worse than a brand name one. It didn't charge the iPhone SE a single time. I mean at this point I feel like I should be glad it didn't light on fire. Now here are the same measurements presented slightly differently. By using the strongest performer as a baseline we can actually adjust all the others to see what their relative real capacity is versus their advertised capacity and then here are the numbers presented a third different way. Now we're looking at the actual amount of phone charging that you get per dollar for these solutions using US prices at the time of editing together this video. Pretty neat, huh? Now there are some additional considerations. The keen-eyed among you have probably noticed that given the iPhone SE's meager battery size, none of these chargers seem to be delivering the manufacturer's claims. But that ignores that the iPhone SE's are actually on and operating while the experiment is running. We preferred this approach as it allowed us to avoid interacting with the phones during the test. Varying screen on time would be quite damaging to our results. Which leads us then to the conclusion. While this investigation isn't the be-all and end-all of battery bank quality assessment. I mean we didn't discharge and recharge each of them 500 times or test across 10 different iPhone SE's per model of battery bank or anything like that. I'd consider it good enough to be you know plus or minus. Let's say 5 to 10 percent to tell us what sort of the best initial quality is if we're to make a comparison to the automotive industry. So if nothing else it gives us a look into the measurement and validation practices of these particular brands on these fairly similar products. And what we learn then is that if you're buying from a reputable brand it's hard to go very wrong, but if something seems too good to be true like this one it probably is. Speaking of too good to be true, dbrand lets you visualize what your phone's gonna look like with one of their high quality vinyl skins before you have to place an order. You select your device whether it's a phone or they've even got Macbooks and PC laptops including Dell's XPS line on there or a game controller or a game console. And then you pick out all the different surfaces and you can mix and match different skins whether you want something that you know doesn't clash and actually looks good together or whether you want something completely out to launch like a phone. Like that iPhone SE that we showed off at the beginning of the video. Their prices are reasonable, they ship worldwide, and they're just generally good guys. We've been working with them for a long time. So if you're interested in checking out a dbrand skin all you gotta do is hit that link in the video description and skin up your device. It looks better and protects it from incidental scrapes and scratches at the same time. So thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit the like button or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at Amazon. Instructions up there by buying a cool shirt like this one linked down there or with a direct monthly contribution through our community forum which is also linked down there and a pretty cool place to just go hang out and talk tech by the way. Now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next. So click that little button in the top right corner to check out our latest video over on channel Super Fun where we we do things that are a lot more fun than that.