After the small petite 3,000mAh Power Mini Battery Pack, today, we have the Power Castle 11200mAh battery pack for review. Courtesy of HisGadget, here we have a sample of the Power Castle for our scrutinizing. How does this match up? Is this really value for your money? Let us find out for you!
Taking a ‘brick’ kind of design, the design of the Power Castle is pretty common again, and yields nothing spectacular. However, it still does omit an aura of quality build and solidness in the choice of aluminum alloy brushed shell.
Similar to the Power Mini, this comes with the standard microUSB charging cable plus a fiber padded pouch to protect the powerbank during transportation.
The size of the battery bank, is comparable to the Lenmar Helix that we reviewed sometime ago. However, this comes with 2 USB ports rather than 3, found on the Lenmar. Furthermore, the ports featured here is the 2.1A and 1.0A ports respectively. Comparing to a BlackBerry Passport, it does have much more volume than it.
The battery bank, is charged via microUSB. What sets this apart, however, is the use of a digital display plus circuit board. I am, inclined to believe that the use of a LCD digital display to show the stats of the battery pack consumes more than just light indicators, but, the use of this also showcased more details that a indicator could. Like the Power Mini again, this battery pack comes with a LED flashlight for use in sticky situations.
So now, onto performance, how does this stack up?
First up, this battery bank is pitted onto my ol’ trust-worth BlackBerry Bold 9900. The BlackBerry Bold comes with a J-M1 battery with a rated capacity of 1230mAh. With 2 ports, are both able to juice my baby up?
Alas, no, the 2.1A is being rejected by the device, however, the device is accepting the 1A port on a standard BlackBerry Cable.
Next up, we have another contender that is L-S1 that is for the BlackBerry Z10 series. Rated at 1,800mAh, how many times can this beast charge it? Well, the final charge time was just 4 at both 1A and 2A.
So now, let me pit it against the N-X1 external battery charger with completely depleted N-X1 batteries (for BlackBerry Q10). These batteries are rated at 2,100mAh. The result is that this could only charge slightly less than 4 times on the external battery charger on both 1A and 2A.
To take a look, however, from the device point of view, we have decided to charge up my BlackBerry Porsche Design P’9982 from 0% to full instead, and surprise! It gave it a charge of 8 times! Conversely, charging up the BlackBerry Passport, it only provided about 2 charges and the third charge was up till 78% from flat.
Is this any worth for value though? With a price tag of just US$22.99 on amazon and contrasting with our favourites that costs way above the us$50 mark, this is pretty much the bang for buck with the handy LCD display and LED light. The solid build and feel is a big bonus however, because of the digital components, I won’t exactly say this is rugged.
The Intocircuit Power Castle 11200mAh is now available on Amazon for us$29.99
Note: A sample unit was provided for the purpose of this review
