Patriot, Luxa2 and Antec USB Battery Head-to-Head Review

Performance

Typically, with these sort of devices, I keep them in the office, charge them up, discharge them and give a A to B kind of review, but this time, I wanted to do something a little bit different, so I put them in my backpack and took them on the road with me. In fact, I took them much further than the road would take me, as I used all of them for my journey from the UK to Taipei for Computex 2015, where they were used each day for the 12 days I was there, as well as during the flights and road trips that entailed.

Build Quality

You may have noticed a few bumps and scratches on some of the batteries in my pictures, simply because I’ve already road tested them before I started this review. Out of all of them, the Antec took the most scratches from day to day use, which is surprising as it felt the most durable at first. Of course, it is still durable, but some of the finish did scuff off it easier than the others. The leather of the Luxa2 held up pretty well overall, maybe a little dirt getting caught in the stitching, but that’s to be expect from something you’ve got in your jeans pocket half of the day. The Patriot Fuel+, however, looks brand new and the hard glossy plastics stayed nice and shiny by the end of testing.

Performance

The Luxa2 was never going to be the strongest performance, it hast the smallest battery after all. It look about an hour to charge my Sony Xperia Z3 from flat to 80%. It won’t charge the battery fully, as the Z3 has a 3100mAh battery, the P1 only has 2800mAh capacity. However, this is more than enough to get you to the end of the day and the compact pocket-friendly size is a huge advantage for the times you don’t have a backpack with you.

The Fuel+ isn’t pocket-friendly, so I didn’t take this one out on to the event with me as often. Sure it fits in your bag, but its thicker body made it a little impractical overall. Its design is well suited as a desktop unit and I found it worked very well in the hotel room, where I had an issue with limited amounts of plug sockets. Charging phones overnight was great on this and it managed to fully charge an iPhone 6 Plus and the Z3, while still having some power left over to charge one of the phones almost fully again.

The Lifebar is by far my favorite device so far. It’s still quite big and heavy, but the slim shape of it means it’s easily secluded in your bag without causing much issue with my other gear; my camera and laptop for example. It’s 2.1A charging socket is great for rapid charging of your device and it meant I could keep shooting 4K video and using the camera flash extensively without worrying about my battery life. The Lifebar managed to charge the iPhone 6 Plus full twice and the Z3 fully once, with enough left over to charge a HTC Desire that was in need of rescue to from 3% to 60% before it needed a recharge. The only issue being that trying to charge the iPhone and Z3 simultaneous cause it to trip out, so only one high powered device could be charged at a time, unlike the Fuel+ which had no issues with this.