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I have a serious problem with buying chargers. I have way too many, but every once in a while a situation arises where a good charger or battery bank totally saves the day and helps me justify buying more.
This one was definitely one of those purchases, but it’s shaping up to be something that lives in my travel bag and is actually very useful. The Anker 733 Power Bank is not just a power bank, it’s a wall charger with a built-in battery, which I honestly find a lot more useful than just a power bank. I’ve had my eye on it for a while, but recently it went on sale for $30 off on Amazon, so I decided it was time to pick one up.
Battery banks are useful, but they’re one of those things that you carry around all the time in your bag and actually use rarely. This one can just do wall charger duty until you need to leave and your phone isn’t charged or your power goes out, and then the battery bank functionality kicks in to save the day.
I’m getting ahead of myself though, so let’s start at the beginning. The 733 is a rectangle roughly 4.5 inches tall and 2.5 inches wide, and a little over an inch thick. On the back, there’s a folding AC power plug. On the front, there’s a button with battery status indicator, two USB type C ports, and a USB type A port.
When acting as a charger, plugged into AC power, you get 65w from either USB C port if nothing else is connected. If you connect devices to both USB C ports, you get 45w at the top port and 20w at the bottom port. That’s a pretty good setup for a laptop and a cell phone, and that’s what I will use this charger for the vast majority of the time. The USB A port maxes out at 22w, but I can’t find exactly how everything will be divided up when all three ports are in use. I’ll do some research and follow up if I find anything, but in practice it’s not all that likely to matter. USB C powers pretty much everything I have, the only thing that might get plugged into USB A is some older device that isn’t going to draw much power anyway. Things like cheap kids toys and stuff.
When acting a battery you get 30w with just one USB C in use and 15w each with both in use. That should be good enough to top up your laptop in a pinch, but the more likely use case is going to be phone charging.
The power bank has a battery capacity of 10,000mAh, that should give me about 30% battery on my M1 Macbook Pro, a solid two or three charges on a non-max iPhone, close to a full charge on my iPad Mini, etc. I haven’t actually tested this battery bank yet, but I have other 10,000mAh battery banks by Anker, so I have a pretty good idea of how it will perform.
My plan is to put this in my travel bag and have a good travel charger capable of charging my laptop and iPhone and Apple Watch all at the same time, which have a battery reserve for if someone forgets to charge something before we leave the hotel. Our next road trip is booked for March, I’ll post an update then.
The Anker 733 Battery Bank is currently $30 off on Amazon.
