We all love our gadgets, but keeping them charged isn’t a fun chore. Especially when you’re mobile and not near a power outlet. The guys from Power Practical who brought us the PowerPot are back with a new crowdfunding project for a product called the Pronto. The Pronto is a portable backup battery that recharges extremely fast. Fast enough that only 5 minutes will allow it to store enough juice to recharge an iPhone. Power Practical is being backed by Mark Cuban of the popular (and one of my favorites) TV show Shark Tank where entrepreneurs pitch new product ideas in hopes of getting them backed by one of the sharks.
“Within seconds of meeting them on ‘Shark Tank,’ I recognized immediately how special the Power Practical team is,” said Mark Cuban. “The new Pronto is their latest innovation. There’s no battery pack like it on the market in terms of speed and power. Not one.”
The Pronto power pack will be available in two hard-anodized aluminum versions. The smaller lightweight Pronto 5 has a 4,500 mAh capacity which provides enough power for three full iPhone 5 charges. The heavy-duty Pronto 12 has a 13,500 mAh capacity which is capable of nine iPhone 5 charges. Both battery packs charge to full capacity in only 1 hour.
A $79 pledge lands a backer the Pronto 5 and a $119 pledge lands a backer the Pronto 12 with shipping estimated for May of 2015. The project has 20 days left and they’ve already almost quadrupled their initial goal of $50,000. For more info head over to their Kickstarter page.
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“The Pronto battery pack stores enough power to recharge an iPhone in only 5 minutes”
This claim is misleading; it suggests that you can recharge your phone in 5 minutes but, after reading the article further, I see that it actually means that the backup battery can be charged-up sufficiently in 5 minutes to enable it to recharge a phone.
Like scott said, this is intentionally misleading. While the battery may get enough power to charge your phone in 5 minutes your phone itself will charge at the normal rate. A charger has no effect on charging rate as long as it meets the minimum requirements. You can hook up the world’s largest 5v usb power supply to a phone and the phone will only draw as much power as it can handle. The only way this could be changed is if the charging circuit in the phone was replaced or modified.
I don’t see what’s so misleading. It says that in five minutes of charging time, the Pronto will have enough power to recharge an iPhone. It doesn’t say it will be slamming a full charge into the iPhone in five minutes. The benefit here is that in a situation where you are travelling and have a short layover between flights, you could plug up the Pronto for a few minutes and its internal battery would store enough power that you could use it to charge up your phone after you’ve boarded the plane. Plugging up the phone itself for 5 minutes wouldn’t give you enough power to make a difference, but plugging up the Pronto should give it enough power to then recharge your iPhone, at its normal charging rate, to a full charge.
I didn’t say the claim was intentionally misleading; merely that it was misleading. The confusion could have been avoided by simply rewording the sentence e.g.
“The Pronto battery pack stores enough power in 5 minutes to recharge an iPhone”
This is great as most of us aren’t as diligent in charging our power banks than we are at charging our phones. Especially power banks with high capacity where you’d only have to charge once a week. But the size looks bulky compared to other power banks of comparable capacity.
Cool portable charger, I might just get one to try it out. I just bought a portable charger similar to the pronto called powergo ss 10,000. It is a 10,000mAh battery pack that can fully recharge itself in less then 10 minutes. My test showed it recharged completely in around 8 minutes. I think this power pack is faster then the pronto. However, I would still like to buy it and try it out to compare the one I have with the pronto.