Sunday, January 25, 2015

Lumsing’s harmonica-shaped power bank is everything you could want in an external battery

Lumsing’s harmonica-shaped power bank is everything you could want in an external battery

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Lumsing’s harmonica is an inexpensive, powerful charger for your iPhone or iPad.

Battery packs are a necessary evil in our modern lives. Devices that can’t get through a day without a charge surround us, but the thin-and-light profiles we take for granted can’t accommodate swappable batteries. Add battery-intensive tasks like gaming or video to the mix, and the result is that we often don’t feel safe leaving the house without an extra battery in our bags.

If you’re in the market for a necessary evil, I like Lumsing’s Harmonica Style Portable Power Bank. It looks good, feels great in the hand, works great, has tons of battery life and is super-cheap. What more do you want for an accessory that you really don’t want to have to carry around with you at all?

With possible exceptions like the HyperJuice, which can charge MacBooks as well as iPhones or iPads, few people are going to wax poetic about the technology of a backup battery. What is there to say? It’s just a battery in a case with a couple of USB ports drilled into the side. But even by those standards, I like the Lumsing a lot.

First of all, it has a lot of capacity. Its 10,400mAh battery is enough to fully charge an iPhone around eight times, an iPad mini about two-and-a-half times and an iPad Air once. In my tests, you’ll get a little less, but that’s pretty common for external batteries: Not all the electricity makes it from the battery to your device, but the vast majority of every watt does.

If the Lumsing was $100, getting, say, seven iPhone charges out of the battery instead of eight would be a deal-breaker. But the Lumsing is cheap: You can buy one for around $20 on Amazon right now, down from its MSRP of $60, making this one of the cheapest, highest-capacity batteries I’ve ever seen.

But the Lumsing doesn’t feel cheap. Part of that is because of its innovative harmonica-style case, which makes the charger feel great in the palm of your hand. It’s well-balanced, and while the case of the Lumsing Harmonica Style Portable Power Pack is plastic, it’s painted to resemble metal. The Champagne-colored unit I reviewed matched my wife’s gold iPhone 5s.

Truth be told, all my complaints about Lumsing’s battery pack are pretty nit-picky. The battery only has two USB ports, one for iPad charging and one for iPhone charging. Sure, there could be more, but I don’t really care that much. And I guess the power button sounds a little “clicky” when you push it, something that might annoy you for a millisecond every day. Jony Ive wouldn’t have let a design detail like that through, but he might if he was designing $20 battery packs.

Overall, if you’re looking for a portable battery pack, I’d recommend the Lumsing Harmonica Style Portable Power Bank. It’s everything you really need in a battery pack: It’s inexpensive, reliable, attractive and well-made. What more could you ask?

 

51JWqNRWllL._SL1500_Lumsing Harmonica Style Portable Power Bank
The good: Inexpensive, reliable, attractive, powerful and well-made.
The bad: A few small details here and there, but nothing major.
The verdict: For $20, you won’t find a better, longer-lasting battery pack.
Buy from Amazon

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