Tech Armor ActivePower 12000mAh External Battery Portable Powerbank

Tech Armor ActivePower 12,000 mAh powerbank

Powerbanks are becoming an essential part of many people’s daily lives, especially when some devices such as the iPhone losing its battery in matter of hours. Even for devices with comparably much better battery life, having a spare battery or a portable power source can be a life saver, especially on a road trip or if you’re stuck in traffic. Tech Armor sent us a sample of their powerbanks, under their ActivePower line up.

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Tech Armor, is a company more known for their screen protectors, rather than accessories such as powerbank or USB cables. That said, we should not underestimate them, and so, how good is their product? Let us find out for you now.

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In this review, we have received the ActivePower 12000mAh variant. Tech Armor has other capacities as well, such as 3000mAh, 6000mAh and 20800mAh variants. Also note that Tech Armor has been touting their 2 year replacement warranty which is pretty long, considering the fact that most of the other brands and even phone manufacturers only cover the battery for 1 year.

The retail packaging for the Tech Armor ActivePower is a nice little gift box, comprising of a manual, microUSB cable as well as the powerbank itself. This is different from many other powerbanks, which omit the manual.

Tech Armor ActivePower 12000mAh top side view

The powerbank, like most of the offerings, is powered by a microUSB port. The powerbank comes with a LED light which acts like a torch when you need it and 2 USB ports. The USB ports also come with 2 colors, the leftmost is black and sports ‘up to 1.3A’ whilst the one on the right is blue and has a maximum output of ‘up to 2.1A’. We will take a closer at it below.

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The powerbank itself is made of a matte material, although the sides are glossy (which are unfortunately is a real fingerprint magnet); it is very very nice to hold in the hand.

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Comparatively to my favourite Lenmar Helix, the size is pretty small especially when compared to others such as the intocircuit PowerCastle and the highly popular XiaoMi PowerBank.

From left: XiaoMi 16,000mAh powerbank, BlackBerry Porsche Design P'9983, BlackBerry Porsche Design P'9982, Lenmar Helix 11,000mAh, Tech Armor ActivePower 12,000mAh, IntoCircuit Power Castle 11,200mAh

From left:
XiaoMi 16,000mAh powerbank, BlackBerry Porsche Design P’9983, BlackBerry Porsche Design P’9982, Lenmar Helix 11,000mAh, Tech Armor ActivePower 12,000mAh, IntoCircuit Power Castle 11,200mAh

Like most other powerbanks, there is an indicator to tell us the remaining charge, so where is it? Well, it is at the top, with 4 LED indicators, each representing about 25% of charge.

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So, how does this really perform? To better help to test powerbanks, I bought a new kit – the USB voltage and ampere testing kit, as the name implies, it will test and show out the voltage and amount of ampere or juice that a USB port is pumping out. Together with a 1-2A resistor, let us see how well this can perform!

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First of all,without any resistor or anything ‘plugged in’, we have a 5.2V line, which is normal for a microUSB. First we are going to test the black port or the ‘up to 1.3A’ port.

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With a 1A resistor turned on for it, it drains at 0.95A and 4.85V which seems pretty normal to us. Now, what happens if we attempt to suck out 2A from it? (Note: we had to turn on burst shot to capture it)

It churned out a 1.8A before cutting out within 5 seconds resetting the whole powerbank.

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Moving onto the ‘up to 2.1A’ port, it starts with a 5.18V.

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Turing up the resistor to 1A, it manages to draw 0.98A which was higher than the other port.

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And at 2A, it manages to draw 1.88A from the powerbank.

So what does this all mean? The powerbank is more than capable to charge most of our devices, however, for more power-demanding devices such as the BlackBerry Passport, I would advise using the blue or faster charging port to charge. This advice holds true because I did get a powerbank reset scenario upon connecting the powerbank to my BlackBerry Passport, though, not to the other BlackBerry 10 devices such as the P’9983 or P’9982.

Finally, for those still using the legacy devices like myself as a daily driver, we all know how fussy the device can be in accepting a charging power source. So can this charge the all-time favourite BlackBerry Bold 9900?

The answer is YES! Yes, the cable supplied with the powerbank can charge my fussy BlackBerry Bold 9900! 🙂

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In conclusion, the Tech Armor ActivePower 12,000mAh powerbank is a worthy powerbank that is fuss-free, petite and comes packed with quite a bit of juice and an awesome 2 year warranty. Priced at USD$34.95 from Tech-Armor and fulfilled by Amazon, do check this out if you’re looking to grab a power bank.

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