Cygnett ChargedUp Pro
ALL THE ON-THE-GO JUICE YOUR GEAR COULD POSSIBLY NEED.
THIS BEEFY 20,000MAh power bank from Cygnett is pitched at tech enthusiasts who need lots of juice while out and about. While it’ll technically fit in a small shoulder- or handbag, its biggish footprint and 450g carry weight means it’ll make its presence known wherever it goes.
Still, it does deliver when it comes to performance. With Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0 support, it can juice-up most Android smartphones at top speed — with our Samsung Galaxy S9+, it matched our wallcharger’s speed, going from 10% battery to full in around 90 minutes. We squeezed five full recharges (plus around 15%) of our S9+ test unit (which has a 3,500mAh battery) out of the Cygnett before it was drained, and it also managed 4.5 refills on a Nintendo Switch console.
Design-wise, there’s not much to it — a matte-rubber finish on the outside makes it feel good in the hand and it’s not as ‘sticky’ as most silicon cases, so it’s easy to slip in and out of a bag. There’s a discrete bank of five LEDs (four blue, one green) in that black band that wraps around the top — which indicate remaining charge — and three upward facing USB ports, two of which are USB-As (one for up to 12V/1.5A fast-charging and the other for up to 5V/3A regular-speed), plus a USB-C, which is used for recharging the bank itself or providing up to 20V/2.25A (45W) of power for more demanding devices like portable laptops. All three of those ports can be used simultaneously.
Using that latter USB-C port to power a 13-inch MacBook Pro at full screen brightness, we managed to get an impressive 4:30hr runtime — a great result that’s around 60% of the 6–7 hour running time we get from the internal battery. It’s worth noting that you need to use that USB-C port to power laptops — using USB-A, our MacBook refused to draw further power from the ChargeUp at about 40%. At that battery level, the Cygnett doesn’t seem to be able to output the higher voltage needed to keep a running laptop happy.
The only thing we don’t like about the ChargeUp is how much time it takes to recharge that 20,000mAh battery. Using the S9+ charger, that took just under 10 hours — although that was cut to just under 4 hours with a higher-powered MacBook charger.