While it might be tempting to think that a power bank is very much just a power bank, the reality is that there are many types of batteries out there – and searching for one on Amazon can easily land you in murky waters full of fake brands with dubious safety records.
Anker's long stood out from the crowd thanks to, basically, a higher standard of quality (albeit it isn't immune to the odd product recall itself), and I've been using its power banks for years now. Still, the Anker Prime number I got my hands on a few weeks ago has stood out from what I've touched before, in a few ways.
For one thing, this takes the crown as the new biggest power bank I've ever used, at least in capacity terms. It has a whopping 20,000mAh of power hidden in what suddenly becomes an impressively compact body once you realise how much charge that really is.
In my case, that means four full charges of my iPhone, and you can basically swap that number out for my Nintendo Switch 2, if you prefer. That's enough power to get me through a long weekend holiday nearly without ever needing a plug, which is slightly mad.
Usefully, like many of Anker's recent launches, it also has a little screen to tell me how quickly it's charging whatever I connect to it, or to keep me updated on its own recharge when it's hooked up to power.
Two USB-C ports are actually the only ones I've used so far, but it does have a USB-A option for those with some pesky older wires they just can't quite get rid of. Really, though, it's all about those higher-power ports, which can do some mad things.
Principally, if you hook up a MacBook Pro to the power bank and nothing else, one of its ports can deliver up to 140W of power, which is seriously impressive. Having a power bank that can rescue not just your phone but also your laptop isn't something many people can say.
One reason why it's rare, of course, is that it comes with a whack of a price tag. The full RRP of the Prime power bank is £130, although it's already down to £110 right now with a coupon for Black Friday. Even with that discount, you're looking at a seriously pricy bit of charging kit, and it might only really make sense for professionals right now.
If you need to know that you can charge up your kit on the move, even in a pinch, it's an unreal backup option, but smaller-capacity power banks probably make more sense for most of us.
Still, given that the Prime power bank weighs about the same as a much older 10,000mAh bank I've had for years, there's no doubt that I'll keep hold of it as my one-stop shop for holidays and work trips. It's a banker on that front.
