Specifications:
- Battery capacity: 5V/3100mAh
- Mini USB input: 5V/500mA
- USB output: 5V/1A
What’s Hot:
- Super compact
- Quickly charges your devices
What’s Not:
- Very long charge time for the device itself
- Needed an additional and different cord
- Sometimes gets hot to the touch
Bottomline:
- You might need to dig up a miniUSB cord that doesn’t resemble a telephone cord to charge the Power Sunny itself and use your own microUSB cord for charging your devices, but otherwise, it’s usable and can fit in your pocket.
Before power banks, people had to rush to the nearest wall socket with their chargers to get their devices charged when their batteries were in the red. Now that we have power banks, we don’t need to do that. We can charge our devices when we need to, and if we have a large enough power bank, we can charge multiple devices or charge the same device more than once. In an increasingly mobile society, power banks are becoming more essential for those who are constantly on the go.
The MiLi Power Sunny is very compact—it’s actually smaller than some of the devices that they’re responsible for charging, so portability won’t be an issue. The power bank itself has 3100mAh available for your devices to use. The main cord (which can also be used as the charging cord) resembles a landline telephone cord. For those who remember having a landline phone, those cords can get tangled easily. The device also comes with an iPhone/iPod/iPad cord and another adapter so you can charge devices with a microUSB port. It would have helped if they had included a third cord to specifically charge microUSB devices instead of just the adapter.
There is a miniUSB port on the left to charge the Power Sunny itself, and a regular sized USB port to the right to charge your devices. If you have any other miniUSB cords, you can also use them to charge the device. I used the cord from my PlayStation 3 controller to charge the device. You won’t see any distinctive markings other than the MiLi logo. There are four lights and one button on the bottom of the device—one light represents a 25 percent charge, so if all four are lit up, you know you have 100 percent juice to use for your devices. Just plug in your device to get it charged, and press the button to check how much juice the Power Sunny has left. There’s only one USB port to charge your devices on, and this was probably done to keep the Power Sunny as compact as possible.
The Power Sunny also takes a painfully long time to charge despite having less battery capacity than its big brother, the Power Rover. If you need a 100% charge for the day, it’s best to just plug it in overnight. If you have devices with a large battery capacity, such as the current generation of smartphones, you’ll probably need to do this every day. It also gets hot to the touch while charging, like many compact devices, so be careful about handling it after you’ve charged it. Charging devices with the power bank took anywhere between two hours for devices with less battery capacity to around four hours or more for devices with larger battery capacity, so it will largely depend on how much juice your device can hold to get to a 100% charge.
In the end, the Power Sunny is just a miniature version of its big brother, the Power Rover. It can charge devices quickly and is definitely a usable power bank. Its biggest advantage, of course, is that it it can fit in your pocket and give your other gadgets that quick boost when their batteries start dipping into the red.
First Published in Gadgets Magazine, May 2013
Words by Jose Alvarez