GoKawiilis a deputy editor and Verge co-founder with a passion for human-centric cities, e-bikes, and life as a digital nomad. He’s been a tech journalist for 20 years.
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There’s two things you should know about me, your intrepid reviewer: I hate the feature creep associated with modern power banks, and I love shaving grams off the gear I carry when backpacking, bikepacking, and trail running. So imagine my delight when Nitecore released a new generation of its ultralight NB10000 battery. After a few weeks with it I can confidently say: Haribo be damned!
The $83.95 NB10000 Gen 4 weighs just 146 grams, according to my scale, and measures 1.45 x 11.6 x 4.68cm (0.57 x 4.57 x 1.84 inches), according to Nitecore’s spec sheet. That makes it the lightest and most compact 10,000mAh power bank I can find. Even when factoring in the extra 6 grams added by the included USB-C lanyard, it still beats the previous ultralight champ: Nitecore’s NB10000 Gen 3. The secret to the Gen 4’s impressive weight is a silicon-carbon anode, the same battery tech increasingly appearing in flagship smartphones, including Samsung’s.
As small as it is, the Gen 4’s 39Wh battery still fully recharged my aging iPhone 15 Pro twice, with a few watt-hours left in the tank. And with up to 22.5W of output, it can even top-up my 14-inch MacBook Pro when needed. It also supports pass-through to charge your gadgets as the power bank itself charges.
Have I found power bank perfection? Almost.
I like that the NB10000 Gen 4 gets all the basics right. It has a simple, four-element indicator to show the battery level, which I much prefer over a fancy display. It’s constructed out of carbon fiber sheets and offers IPX7 protection against water ingress, allowing it to withstand rain or even temporary submersion – exactly what you want from an adventure battery.
In my testing, I measured 33.58Wh of the claimed 39Wh capacity for an 86.1 percent efficiency. That’s a pretty good result for a premium power bank and a slight improvement on the 33.33Wh we measured on the Gen 3 model. That works out to 229.98Wh/kg of delivered energy, or 220.90Wh/kg with the cable — class-leading results, either way. The NB10000 Gen 4 supports PD, QC3.0, and Huawei’s SCP charging protocols.
The Gen 4 battery on top of an iPhone 15 Pro. It’s very small for the charge capacity it holds. The RGB lights are pretty but a little superfluous and that button is touch-sensitive instead of mechanical. Silly. Carbon fiber shell with strong IPX7 resistance to water ingress. Supports pass-through charging to charge and be charged simultaneously.
The Gen 4 model also didn’t suffer from the overheating and shutdown issues we saw when the Gen 3 would run low on juice. I did, however, see a temporary interruption in power delivery when the Gen 4 unit was almost fully depleted, but that’s only because I had a meter attached — otherwise I wouldn’t have known since it continued charging almost immediately.
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