There is a whole variety of phone chargers and external batteries out there, so it can be confusing deciding on which one to pick. The choice will ultimately come down to your needs. If you spend most of your time near a wall outlet, then your standard wall charger will be all that you will almost ever need. If you spend a lot of time traveling, especially via a plane, and you tend to carry a lot of gadgets with you, then I would recommend you look into getting at least a 10,000 mAh external battery. For everything in between you can select the battery size closest to your needs and the kind of gadgets you carry around. I would not recommend going below a 5,000 mAh battery though. The smaller batteries will probably not be sufficiently big for a full recharge if you don’t remember to charge them up regularly.

This is a very nice, effective, and compact battery. It is thicker than most smartphones these days, but it’s also significantly shorter and narrower. It can be easily carried around in a small messenger bag, briefcase, or a purse. It can even fit in a pocket (hey, it is smaller than a phone), but I would personally not recommend it.

The battery doesn’t come with its own charging adapter, which is not such a big deal for me: I have plenty of USB charging adapters laying around. The battery has two permanently attached USB cables: one micro USB and one Lightning. This is a great feature to have. It means that you don’t need to carry additional cables with you, but can instead immediately use the battery wherever you find yourself. However, if your device doesn’t support either one of those two USB inputs (some older iOS devices for instance), then you might be better off buying a different battery.

The charging time for this battery was pretty quick, as was the charging of external devices. I was able to fully charge my iPhone 5S with plenty of room to spare. I was even able to charge my iPad to about 50% of its capacity. I also tried it with several other micro-USB charging devices (Galaxy S 3, Kindle, headphones, …) and it worked fine with all of them, although I did not test them fully to ascertain the total charging time.

I wish that this charger included the wall prongs to be used for direct charging from the wall without a use of an adapter. With such additions this could be a truly perfect portable charging solution. Other than that, I am very pleased with this battery and would recommend it to anyone who is in a need of small extra charging while on the go.

**** Product sample provided for review purposes. ****