Robert Triggs / Android Authority
TL;DR Belkin has settled a class-action suit alleging it misrepresented the capacity of its power banks.
Customers living in California who purchased power banks between 2014 and 2024 may be eligible to submit a claim.
Claimants can expect to receive $2 cash, or a $5 Belkin credit.
Is there any one component of mobile tech that’s responsible for more anxiety than batteries? When we aren’t worried about the batteries in our phones catching fire, we’re worried about them losing capacity over time. At the very least, we’d love it if they accurately communicated their capacity to us, letting us know exactly what we can expect from them. Even that might be too big of an ask, though, and that issue is now core to a class-action settlement that could net Belkin customers a few bucks.
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When you go shopping for a great power bank, you’re going to see a lot of numbers thrown at you, and maybe the most important one there is the total power capacity. Historically, that’s been expressed in terms of milliamp-hours (mAh). You’ll also see watt-hours (Wh) sometimes — an arguably more useful figure that doesn’t make assumptions about output voltage. But mAh is so ingrained as the popular metric here that a lot of us just lock onto that and use it exclusively as we compare models.
A few years back, though, some Belkin customers took issue with the fact that they weren’t getting all the power they expected out of their battery banks. While there’d be one mAh figure advertised, tests reportedly showed that the banks failed to deliver that much charge to target devices.
Some losses here are to be expected — when you use one battery to charge another, you’re not going to do so with 100% efficiency — but a class-action lawsuit (Miley v. Belkin International, Inc.) claimed discrepancies more like 40%, which seems a bit excessive. Anker disputes those claims, but ultimately doesn’t want this held up in court forever.
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