Xiaomi had officially launched a high-capacity 16,000mAh power bank on Thursday, 6 November 2014. It uses batteries made by LG and Samsung, too, so there’s a lot of R&D inside its smooth metal casing.
It's very obvious how much Apple design has influenced this product. The entire mass looks like it is an Apple product, wrapped in soft-touch anodised aluminium, with two endplates in stark white with a MacBook Pro-esque circular power button. Honestly, These battery pack looks beautiful.
The top face has the power button, two full-sized USB charging ports, a micro-USB socket, and four tiny white LEDs in series. Same as the older power bank design, press the button, and the LEDs light up to tell you how much battery capacity the pack has remaining.
Plug a USB cable into any of the two full-sized USB ports and hook it up to a smartphone or tablet or other device in need of a charge, and the MI Charger automatically kicks into action. Plug a cable into the micro-USB socket and connect that to a USB wall-socket, and the cell starts to restore its lost capacity
The 16,000mAh capacity rating is, by official measurement, spot-on. From a fully topped-off charge, it can discharge and recharged am iPhone 6 5.5 times before the Mi Power Bank battery reported it was empty.
There’s enough energy stored away in the Mi Power Bank to restore Xiaomi's own Mi4 phone 3.5 times with plenty of change; an iPhone 6 can be charged almost 5.5 times. Even the long lasting iPad Mini can be fully recharged 2.5 times with a little juice to spare.
Charging it from empty to full is simple enough, although it takes time — we clocked a little over five hours for the battery to completely charge and report 100 per cent capacity.
Even with that pricing caveat, we still really like the Xiaomi MI Charger. It’s an odd thing to like, but we get a genuine kick out of throwing the battery into our backpack of a morning and knowing that we’ll never run out of phone, tablet or hotspot power at an inopportune time.
Under the hood, it houses five 3,200 mAh batteries (manufactured by LG/Panasonic) with 725Wh/L energy density, two USB ports and weighs 350g.
After coming out with 5,200 mAh and 10,400 mAh power bank models, it looks like the capacity for power banks from Xiaomi just keeps going up and up – with the Chinese gadget maker coming out with a 16000 mAh model. This power bank looks set to give you your mobile charging needs for one whole working week – at least, that should be the rationale for having a power bank with this much juice capacity. Given a flagship gadget in today’s times – say, the Samsung Galaxy S5 – whose main battery capacity is rated at 2800 mAh, this new Xiaomi power bank should be able to give your Galaxy S5 at least 5 full charge cycles. And if you’re the “normal usage” type of user and your smartphone lasts you the whole working day, then the Xiaomi 16000 mAh power bank should be all the extra power you will ever need.
