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Comment by swah | Hacker News Reader

Me too - my Anker car charger delivers 1800 mAh as measured by an Android app called Ampere - I can charge my phone only during commute and use it for 24 hours. A cable I have from them is also high quality.

OTOH some Ebay cables might drop it down to 500 mAh. It was a shock to me because for years I exclusively bought Ebay chargers and cables (around 1/5 of the price of Anker) thinking they would work as specified (or not at all)...

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Different gauge on the power wires give different results during charging. The original .5A of USB worked well with 28 AWG, but you need to go with 24 AWG to get 1A or more out of a charger. Sadly very few cables list this kind of info.

And even when you have the proper cable, you can run into the problem that the charger manufacturer thought the Apple way was the proper way.

Thing is that Apple has some very odd resistor setup on the data pins to indicate max A out of their chargers, while the USB charger spec basically says to short the data pins so that the device can sense it.

Try to charge a non-Apple device in an Apple type charger and you can get anything from full to .5A, depending on how clever the device engineers were...

FYI: "mAh" or milli-amp-hours is a unit of capacity, in this case it makes no sense. Perhaps you mean just "mA", a unit of current, which does make sense in context?

Sorry! You're right.. and the app is also right, I couldn't even copy from it properly :(

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