Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

SHORT VERSION: If you like to travel light and will only be taking 2 devices that need to be charged simultaneously on a daily basis, and/or you'd just prefer the cost/convenience of having one device rather than both a wall charger and a battery pack, this product is tough to beat. However, in order to keep physical size reasonable, Anker had to make tradeoffs around max current output rate and only having 2 ports. If either of those are an issue for you, there are more capable wall chargers and more capable battery packs on the market (some made by Anker!) if you're willing to have them as separate devices at higher cost and more total bulk, hence my calling this a "compromise device". I have this AND a more capable wall charger and battery pack, so I've outlined my different use cases and specific products below. LONG VERSION: I've dedicated this product to work trips, where it's used in the hotel room overnight as a wall charger, then I take it with me on-site each day where this can fully recharge my phone once and with some capacity left. However, when my wife and I are traveling together on vacation and therefore have more total devices and are often out for more hours of the day, this stays at home and instead we bring an Anker PowerPort 4, which is a quad port wall charger that we normally keep in our living room, plus an Anker PowerCore+ 13400, which has enough capacity to fully charge a phone ~5 times -- the PowerPort stays in the hotel room and we take the battery pack with us during the day. (Pro tip: With either device, I/we also carry both 1ft and 3ft Anker PowerLine Dura Lightning cables to choose between keeping things tidy if charging in a bag/pocket or having more slack to get farther away from the charger. We keep them coiled up in the included mesh carrying bag right there with the pack and we bought the two cable lengths in different colors to easily grab the one we want.) In terms of negatives, the USB output current could be better, especially while plugged into an outlet. For reference, typical phone chargers offer 1A (amp), and typical tablet chargers and other premium wall/battery pack chargers offer 2-2.4A -- but many newer phones can accept 2-2.4A if the charger provides it. This product while plugged into AC can provide 2A out of a single port but only 2A TOTAL across both ports, AND it doesn't start recharging its own battery until attached devices are charged. This can create some limitations depending on what you're charging and how long "overnight" charging is for you. Most phones charging at 1A take 2-3 hrs to go from 0-100%, most tablets at 1A would take 8 hours, and this device's battery takes ~3 hours to charge. So if the batteries in 2 phones and this device are all dead and you plug everything in overnight, the phones will definitely be charged by morning and the device itself might also be full as long as you had 5-6 hours to charge. But if you had a dead phone and dead TABLET plugged in, which has a much larger battery and would only receive 1A for 3 hours while the phone charged before stepping up to 2A, the tablet would take ~5.5 hours to fully charge -- before the device even started recharging itself for 3 hours. So what are you plugging in, how long is your "overnight" charge, and how dead will your devices be each night? When NOT connected to AC, output climbs to 3A per port (the most I've seen for non-proprietary and non-Type C chargers) but again only 3A total across both ports. By comparison, the aforementioned PowerCore+ 13400 can do 2.4A per port and 4.8A total for its 2 ports, i.e. up to 60% faster when charging two devices that support that rate, and the PowerPort 4 can do 2A per port and 8A total for its 4 ports. When I asked Anker, they confirmed my suspicion that the 2A max on AC is due to the heat generated by stepping down AC voltage to USB's 5V, which made 2A the most they could safely/reliably provide in a product this size. It would've been nice if it could've handled 4-4.8A total to minimize the time your devices spend tethered to it and improve overnight charging prospects, but then again I'm not sure I'd want this to be larger. Second, having more than 3 LEDs to more precisely indicate charge level would've been handy; other PowerCore products use 4 and the PowerCore+ products use 10 arranged in a ring. And finally, since it works as a wall charger, in a perfect world it would have more USB ports in addition to higher total output, but I understand why it doesn't. The reason the bottom half of the face is blank space rather than having more USB-A outputs is because that's where the battery cells are, so adding more ports would presumably make the product impractically large for a "wall wart", and including a power cable rather than having AC prongs built in would diminish the portability benefit. More ports would also likely make the 5000 mAh battery feel inadequate -- remember, it only charges a typical phone 1-2 times, which wouldn't be much when spread across 3-4 devices -- but again, much more battery capacity means impractical size. Still, like I said at the beginning, this is a very good product for its use case!