Battery extenders and portable batteries are nothing new. Charge the juice box, plug it into your notebook, and bam: you have extra battery life. Though it seems like a fairly simple concept, there’s always more than one way to skin a cat, and let’s face it; some ways can be more efficient than others.
That’s what Gbatteries is claiming with its BatteryBox portable battery. It looks like any other portable battery, but the company claims that it’s what’s under the hood that sets it apart from the competition. Instead of simply supplying juice to your MacBook’s battery, Battery Box powers it via its own internal battery, which can decrease the rate at which your system’s battery degrades, Gbatteries states. On top of that, BatteryBox is stuffed with the company’s own batteryOS power management system, which allegedly manages power much more efficiently when compared with non-batteryOS assisted lithium-ion rechargeable batteries.
Gbatteries makes the case for batteryOS by alleging that it “is designed to dynamically manage energy inside of a li-ion battery pack during charging, idling, and discharging of the pack,” while standard batteries suck power via a steady stream, which the company claims is not as efficient, and doesn’t make use of all of a battery’s internal active materials. Gbatteries claims that with batteryOS, “any OEM li-ion battery to gain the ability store 10-40% more capacity (varies between specific type of li-ion chemistry), have a 4x higher cycle count, and not degrade in capacity over time.” Aside from Gbatteries’ claims of battery efficiency, they’ve also declared that the BatteryBox can provide a full charge to a 13-inch MacBook Air, along with 55 percent of a full charge to a 15-inch MacBook Pro, and 65 percent of a full charge to a 13-inch MacBook Pro.
As for specs, the 8.81 ounce BatteryBox sports a 50Whr/12,000 mAh battery, a single full-size USB port along with a microUSB connector, and includes a MagSafe 2 cable, allowing you to plug it into MagSafe2-equipped MacBook Pro and MacBook Air notebooks. It’ll also charge anything that’s powered via USB or microUSB.
You can pre-order the Gbatteries BatteryBox now for $139, which is currently being beta tested. It’s expected to ship sometime this fall.
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