Can A Power Bank Charge Your Phone In 5 Minutes?

No. Recently, some power banks have started hitting the headlines for their apparent ability to charge your phone in five minutes. It sounds preposterous because it is.

What these power banks are actually able to do is refill their own batteries sufficiently within five minutes that they can then fully charge your phone (which is still awesome, but not quite as awesome as how you first read that news). How quickly they can supply that power to your phone depends firstly on how much power they are able to output, and secondly how much power your phone can accept.

As an example, the Simpiz iTron, uses DUBI 1.0 technology to refill its own 9000mAh battery in 18 minutes. If you consider that as 3000mAh per six minutes, it would certainly have enough power to fully charge most phones within five minutes.

When it comes to then transferring that power to your phone, the Simpiz iTron's fastest output is Quick Charge 2.0. This is incredibly fast, but if you have or will have one of the latest devices that support Quick Charge 3.0, such as the Xiaomi Mi 5 or LG G5, it's not actually the fastest charge they are able to accept.