Portable batteries are part of urban infrastructure in China. I have tried them and I need them to arrive in Europe

After a decade of writing about gadgets and tens of thousands of miles of travel under my belt, a few weeks ago a destination managed to make me nervous. I was traveling, for the first time, to China. A few days before leaving, I realized that I did not have any batteries with the necessary certification and buying them in Spain is complicated. My idea was to get one there, but to my surprise I came across reality: hives of external batteries on every corner.

Below I will tell you about my experience renting one and testing its loading speed.

Powerbanks as urban infrastructure. A few months ago, my colleague Javier He already commented on his fascination with this ecosystem of external batteries that anyone can rent. It is really not something so new, since it has running since 2017 and its concept is very interesting. In China we need the cell phone for everything (AliPay and Wechat They are two apps that are your bank, your transportation card, your payment card, your way of ordering in restaurants and much more) and it is something that drains the battery.

Therefore, the idea arose to locate stations with several external rental batteries at strategic points in the city. The market is dominated by four companies, they are in the main cities and the process is as simple as:

• Scan the station’s QR code.
• Take one of the removable batteries.
• Use them while we eat or move.
• Return them to any other point on the network (it does not have to be at the station where we took it).

renting one. For me, who went with a iPhone 16 in your pocket (whose battery is no wonder), having something like this available was a lifesaver. And, since science doesn’t do itself, during breakfast I rented one available at my hotel with the intention of using it while I ate and returning it just before leaving. The process is indicated just above these lines and, in my case, I used AliPay.

You have to go with the application previously configured and, in my case, I loaded a Revolut prepaid card. I didn’t have any problems during the week I was in Beijing. I scanned the QR code of the charging station with AliPay itself and… blessed translation system. It works when it wants and it translates some things regularly, but enough to understand it.

The price is 0.12 yuan per minute (about 0.014 euros), but since I don’t have a bank account in China, I had to pay a deposit of 99 yuan (about 12 euros). As soon as I paid, the app told me what power bank I had to remove it and the station itself made the corresponding battery LED flash. To load.

Charging experience. The first thing I liked is that you don’t need absolutely anything other than the battery. This includes a USB-C, Lightning and even micro-USB cable. They are short cables, but they are appreciated so you don’t have to carry yours in your pocket. It has LEDs that indicate the charge level and there really isn’t much more to say about the design.

Regarding their characteristics, it depends, but they usually have 5,000 mAh and the big asterisk is in the power. 5V/2.4A It is about 12 W and that implies that it will charge at a slow speed. But hey, it is designed so that you can carry it for a while or while you eat and spend at least half an hour/an hour with it.

On my iPhone 16, the charging times were as follows:

• I started with 26% battery and in 30 minutes I reached 45%.
• At 60 minutes it had reached 64%.
• After 90 minutes it was charged up to 82%.

As I say, a slow experience, but I see it as feasible to spend an hour eating or walking between stores, and recovering 38% allows you to survive the rest of the day. When you return it, you have a map where you see all the available stations. I simply went to a different one, clicked on the finalize the transaction button, scanned the QR again and inserted it into the indicated slot.

The final price was 14 yuan after almost two hours in my possession, about 1.73 euros to my account. And, the next day, I already had the 99 yuan deposit back in my Revolut.

Reviews. Discussing the move with our teammates, we agreed that the price is not high for us, that we use the euro and for those 1.7 euros, well… it allowed me to continue the rest of the day. But we also wonder how the Chinese would view those 14 yuan. And it seems not very well. One of the complaints It is precisely that the price has been increasing in some points.

If at the beginning it cost one yuan per hour, now it ranges between two and six. The reason is that it depends a lot on the location (more or less tourist areas, hospitals, hotels, bars, etc.). Coupled with the fact that it is a very fair power and cell phones have more and more battery life, it is almost better to buy an external battery if you know that every now and then you have to rent at one of these stations (which, in addition, can be full at times and you have to go around looking for another one to return the battery.

The businesses themselves have also been dissatisfied at times, since it is a market monopolized by a few companies that, evidently, control both the rental price and the profits.

Future. Despite this, for tourists, it is an extremely attractive option due to its convenience and because, let’s not fool ourselves, the exchange rate to our currency is favorable to us. And for the industry, it represents an important benefit. In 2020, with a fairly young service, one of the companies that manages it declared that each battery generated an average income of 563 yuan per year. It seems like little, but multiply it by millions of batteries and you get truly outrageous.

For example, in Beijing West Station there are more than 230 stations (each with several batteries), and in some tourist streets in just 100 meters away there are up to 30 of these hives. In 2023, it is estimated that the market will reach 1.7 billion dollars and the industry is expected to reach 5.6 billion by 2029… despite the fact that there are already voices that suggest that the market is stabilizing.

But hey, as I said before, as a user I find it very convenient. And if you keep it… they charge you that 99 yuan deposit. 12 euros for that loading speed is not worth it. By the way, There are already some places in Europe with seasons like that, but it is by no means widespread.

Photos | Xataka

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