The best portable chargers help keep your phone alive when you need it most. They also power our phones, tablets, Nintendo Switch consoles and even our laptops when the need arises. Since we all find ourselves out of the house with low battery life at some point, you'll need a portable charger.
Not long ago, we completed a litany of tests on 10 of the best portable chargers, pulling from the big brands and popular competitors. We tested how fast they charge and how many full phone charges each power bank stores. Though these portable chargers all regularly appear on bestseller lists, they are different in a number of important ways.
We've got these best portable chargers ranked in order of what we ourselves would buy, with shoutouts for the best portable charger, as well our favorite compact charger and the best portable charger for USB-C.
Our testing was performed on the same iPhone 12, with its brightness set at 100%. We tested each charger in four different ways: how much of a charge it added in 15 minutes, how much it added in an hour, the time it took to refuel an iPhone from dead to 100% and how many times it could refill the same iPhone 12 from dead.