Lumsing Glory P2 Plus

At a glance, the Lumsing Glory P2 Plus looks like your average high-capacity no-frills power bank, but it has several compelling attributes.

The first is price, and at £24 it offers good value for a 15,000mAh power bank, with several high-end features. Secondly, it has three outputs: one USB-C and two full-size USB, allowing you to charge a phone, a tablet and another device such as a smartwatch at once. We’re pleased to see one of these full-size outputs supports Quick Charge 3.0 which, until Quick Charge 4.0 makes an appearance in the Snapdragon 835 mobile processor, is the current fastest charging standard for compatible tech.

The other USB output is a Smart connection, so-called because it is able to recognise your device type and adjust how much power it delivers accordingly, with a maximum 12W (2.4A), which is faster than many bundled phone chargers. It is true that your device will draw only the power it requires, therefore making the output less relevant for single-output power banks, but when you are potentially sharing the output between three devices optimising what is given to each can help all three to charge as fast as possible.

As more and more devices adopt USB-C for charging, we’re beginning to see an increasing number of USB-C power banks flooding the market. Many of these are designed primarily for use with USB-C, and so they have just a single USB-C input. The Lumsing caters to all Android users, with both Micro-USB and USB-C inputs – and cables for each supplied in the box.

When we first examined the P2 Plus we were surprised to find that although this USB-C port can output 15.5W (3.1A), it can only draw 10.5W (2.1A) from the mains, which means it powers your phone faster than it can charge its own battery. However, then we realised it supports parallel charge, which means that if you have two power sources you can refill this power bank using both its inputs at once. A desktop charger is ideal for such a job.

When refilled with a single power source, the P2 Plus will take up to nine hours to charge, but with two inputs in action charging time is reduced to just five hours.

That’s a pretty cool feature we haven’t seen before in a power bank, but unfortunately it isn’t supplemented with passthrough charging capability. This is when you are able to simultaneously refill the power bank and charge a connected mobile device, freeing up power sockets, reducing cable clutter and allowing you to leave

When refilled with a single power source, it takes up to nine hours to charge, but with two inputs in action charging time is reduced to five hours

both to charge overnight and wake up to find both batteries full.

With 15,000mAh of power inside you should find the Lumsing will charge an iPhone 7 five times, or a Galaxy S7 3.5 times. Why not more? Because all power banks lose capacity through heat generated and voltage conversion; the industry-standard efficiency is around 65- to 70 percent, meaning you should get around 10,000- to 10,500mAh from the P2 Plus. The highest energyefficiency rating we’ve seen on a power bank is 90 percent.

So it has some nice features, but the Lumsing’s design is fairly bland. It’s a rectangular slab of matte black plastic, with a Lumsing logo on the top and four LEDs that light up (during operation or as you press the power button) to show how much capacity remains. With each LED representing 3750mAh, that’s a fairly big jump between them. However, LCD screens with more accurate readouts remain pretty rare at this price point.

On one end you have the various inputs and outputs, each labelled accordingly, and on the other end (with the text facing the opposite way up) some key specifications.

The power bank itself is necessarily big and heavy, given its capacity, and measures a chunky 20mm thick, 78mm wide and 158mm high. It’s a heavyweight at 356g, so it’s not a power bank you’ll particularly want to keep in a pocket. Nevertheless, given the functionality and pricing it offers a good deal.

Verdict

The design doesn’t thrill us, and we’d like to see support for passthrough charging, but the Lumsing Glory P2 offers great value and some welcome features. Few power banks of this capacity will charge in just five hours.