Anker MagGo Power Bank for Apple Watch Reviewed
Despite my best efforts to fill the house with chargers, portable batteries, docks and stands there are five words I hear more often than not: “I forgot to charge my watch!”
Okay, fine, that’s six, but five sounded more pithy and concise. Let it slide.
And, to be fair, it’s understandable. A depleted watch is an emergency, since exercise that’s not tracked by your smart-watch doesn’t count right? Occasionally we’d paper over this problem by chucking an Apple Watch charger and a portable battery into a bag and hoping for the best.
Forgot to charge your Apple Watch? 🤣 no problem! Forgot your USB C cable? No you didn’t, it’s fixed to the battery 🤣
Anker, however, have solved this problem a little more gracefully with the MagGo Power Bank for Apple Watch, which they kindly supplied me to tinker with. The pitch is a compact and convenient way to charge a modern (USB Type-C endowed) iPhone and an Apple Watch in a single package. Does it deliver? Well, it’s Anker- what do you expect!
The short answer is yes.
First off, this thing is small. Shockingly small. I’m not sure what I was expecting, and the watch charger should have provided some reference for scale, but the size did surprise me. This small package is clearly aimed at being purse and pocket friendly, with the captive USB C cable tenuously doubling as a little carrying loop. It’s secured by a little metal clasp and a magnet to keep the connector in place on the top of the battery. It feels secure, but only time will tell if the strain relief is up to snuff.
The captive USB cable is as useful as it is short 😭
The cable is a little short, but super useful. Despite my best efforts to fill the house with cables, there never seems to be one handy. There’s definitely a theme emerging here. If it does eventually break – I’m always apprehensive of captive cables because cables in general seem to be short-lived around here – then there’s a spare USB Type C port on the battery. Yes, you can use both ports at once. My phone is good old-fashioned Lightning, so I used this little battery to charge a DualSense controller with the captive cable, and plugged my phone into the spare port. It was an awkward setup since the captive cable is quite short and not ideal if you’re intending to use the device you’re charging. That said, it seems to charge my iPhone at about 16-20W so if you can put your phone down for half an hour (difficult, I know) then you should be good to go.
The USB cable doubling as a little carry loop is both brilliant and a little unnerving… I wreck cables fast enough as it is 😬
As long as you remember to charge this little MagGo battery you’ll always have some reserve for your watch and iPhone. In order to assist with this, Anker have made it double as a bedside watch charger. That’s to say, you can charge your watch while the battery charges so if – like me – you’ve managed to develop a habit of taking your watch off in the morning (you wear it overnight for sleep tracking, right?) and placing it on charge while you shower and have breakfast, you’ll end up with a charged battery and watch for your troubles.
The watch charging stand also folds outwards (upwards, if the battery is flat on a table), and the battery’s little built-in display rotates 180 degrees when you do this (you can also rotate it with the little button on the top of the battery). This lines the display up with your watch display so you can use the whole setup as a bedside clock and see battery status at a glance. The display is Anker’s typical invisible-when-off style, and it might be one of the best examples of this. You have to look quite closely to make out where the screen ends and the case begins, and it gives the impression that the battery info is silk-screened onto the plastic. Very nice!
Charging while also passing 7W downstream to a phone seems a little measly but it’s better than most batteries I’ve tried, which pass 0W. Overnight slow charge of battery and phone? Yup!
Downstream phone charging also works, with the battery pulling 15W to charge itself, and dishing out 7W to a connected phone. Add a watch into the equation and the charger finds around 1W for that, too. This is glacially slow by modern charging standards, but does mean that phone, watch and battery will all charge overnight from a single, tidy, USB Type-C power supply and it doesn’t need to be a bulky or fancy one.
Without a phone connected it’ll pull 30W and charge noticeably faster. It doesn’t have the fractional percentage capacity display that some of Anker’s larger batteries sport, but you should still notice it gradually ticking up. At least it does if I stop watching…
The captive USB cable is as useful as it is short 😭
Overall it’s a great little battery. If I were to level (or levy, if you’re a language maverick) any criticism, the captive-cable-as-a-carry-loop feature makes me very nervous and it commands a premium price at £79.99, putting it in a different ballpark to the suspiciously cheap, suspiciously deeply discounted alternatives.
If this is a little spendy and you don’t absolutely need the watch charger then the very similar and much less suspicious 10K mAh Anker Nano is £30 right now. And you even get the tiny screen for an unambiguous summary of your remaining battery.
That said, for your money you get effectively a 2-in-1 charging dock for your phone and watch, plus the portable battery, in a sleek and compelling combo for a frequent traveller. And that little magnet to secure the captive USB cable is a nice touch!
You can Grab the Anker MagGo Power Bank for Apple Watch from Amazon for a spicy £79.99.