Hands On: Anker Astro3 External Battery

Written by Ben

January 12, 2014

Astro3

Nothing ruins your day worse than your phone dying and not having an electrical plug to charge from. Anker has the solution with their Astro Line of External Batteries. Today we are reviewing the Astro3 12000 mAh External Battery.

Battery life on phones continues to get better with each new phone, but sometimes battery life just isn’t good enough to get you through your day or through your trip. The Anker Astro3 has enough battery power to charge your phone up too 6 or 7 times or lengthen your battery life for over 24 hours depending on your device. All phones have different sized battery so your results may vary.

The Astro3 is only 1 inch thick and just about 3.5 inches wide so it can be carried comfortably in either your cargo pant’s pocket or in your laptop bag. The weight is just under 1 pound so there isn’t a lot of extra weight being carried around.

The Astro3 is charged via a microUSB plug. The charging cable is included but no wall plug. You can use your phones charging plug or an aftermarket on that has a USB plug. Charging time will depend on the power output of the plug you are using. Max input charging is 5V/1.5A.

What happens when you have a couple friends who all need to charge their phones at the same time? The Astro3 has 3 charging ports on the top.  One USB Port is labeled Smart. The plug senses your pins in your charging cable to detect you device to charge it at optimum levels. You can charge up to 3 devices at once, but the charging rate will be slower the more devices that are plugged in.

Astro3 Ports

To either see the Astro3’s charge status or to start charging, all you have to do is shake the device and the circular battery status light will illuminate and show the current charge status of the battery. The light is circular and has multiple individual sections to show you in great detail the charge level.

Overall the Anker Astro3 packs a lot of power into a small package. Also the $49.99 price on Amazon gives you a very low cost to mAh ratio that you cant find in many devices with this quality. Head over to iAnker.com to check this and all the other great products they make.

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