Unboxing. What do we have here? This is a really cheap USB charger for a single 18650 size battery.
It uses a micro USB cable to charge the battery from a PC USB port. It also has a USB female connector with 5v output, which can be used to charge other devices. This makes it the cheapest Powerbank. A few colours are available, but at first I couldn’t figure out why the lid is white. You have to plug it in to understand – the leds are blue, and they shine through the white plastic. Obviously they won’t shine through dark coloured lid. Let’s try it out – it works. But I mostly purchased it as a portable USB charger from my vaping device, so I will never run out of power. By the way if you plan to get some lithium rechargeable batteries, never ever be seduced by those cheap EBay offers, especially grey coloured batteries. If you peel the grey film, you may be surprised to find a Panasonic or Sanyo label. The truth is these batteries come from trash. Seen those photos of naked kids vivisecting used electronics dumped to wastelands in 3rd world countries? Well they salvage batteries from old laptops, and these are given a shiny new coat and sold as new. They may have so capacity left, or they may just short circuit. A decent 18650 battery just can’t be cheaper than 7-8 USD. I carry one with me as a spare for the vaping device in a 2-battery case. Now I will carry it in this USB charging box. By the way if the charger is so small and cheap, a tiny circuit board, why don’t you just incorporate in the vaping device so I can charge it directly from an USB port without the need for an additional device? Why do you force me to do additional movements to unscrew and screw back lids to remove the battery? That’s a mystery yet to be understood. After using it for a couple of weeks, I made some improvements which are worth mentioning if you plan to purchase the same device. The first is the lid. It is easy to put in place, but very, very hard to retract because the side hooks are too good. So a good idea is to file down the pertruding hooks inside the device, and place a cord under the lid so you have something to pull it with. I had to use a plastic knife to extract the lid the first time. Now I just don’t put it in place and leave it open. The lid also holds the device electronics in place, and without the lid, the insides may just fell out of the case. I fixed this with a little bit of thermal glue. Of course you may skip all this if you just plan to use it as a powerbank and put the battery inside once and forever. I use it as a charger so I need to access the battery.