Omni 20 Plus review: Portable power for all your gadgets

Picking the right third-party chargers and accessories for your smartphone, laptop, and other gadgets can feel like a confusing mess of plug types and charging standards — even more so now that phones are shipping without a charger in the box. Enter Omnicharge and the Omni 20 Plus, an all-in-one charging solution for all your gadget needs. Let’s take a look at Omnicharge’s take on the charging problem with Android Authority’s Omni 20 Plus review.

What is the Omni 20 Plus?

Omnicharge’s Omni 20 Plus is designed as a one-size-fits-all portable battery pack come portable charger for all your gadgets. Packed with various USB ports, a wall outlet, DC barrel port, and wireless charging support, Omnicharge caters to charging up everything from laptops and smartphones to cameras, drones, and more.

Buyer’s guide: The best wireless chargers

At its core, the Omni 20 Plus is a 20,000mAh power bank that is powered up through any of its 45W USB-C, DC, and wall sockets. Omnicharge states that this is enough capacity for one typical laptop charge cycle, five charges of a DSLR camera, five smartphone charges, and one or two full charges of a drone. Depending on their individual battery capacities, of course. My experience matches up pretty closely with these claims.

Unlike most compact power banks, the Omni 20 Plus will give you high voltage, high power charging while you’re out on the go. You’d think that all this might make the Omni 20 Plus a bulky product, but at just 611g it’s not much heavier than other 20,000mAh power banks on the market. It’s definitely portable.

You can buy the Omni 20 Plus on its own for $199 or as a $249 bundle. We have the latter, which includes a 45W USB-C wall charger with a selection of regional socket adapters, one USB-C to USB-C cable, one USB-C to USB-A cable, and a protective carry case. The bundle saves you some cash but isn’t necessary for those who already own a high-power USB charging plug.

Related: The best USB-C cables you can buy

Test results

The Omni 20 Plus has a serious selection of ports that go well beyond your regular power bank. Think of it as more of a universal plug/battery pack hybrid designed to power a truly wide range of products, including those with a mains plug.

The AC/HVDC outlet provides up to 100W of power with a 120V, 60Hz modified sine wave in the US model or 230V, 50Hz modified sine wave in the European variant. The 5.5 x 2.1mm bi-directional DC barrel port can be used to charge up the Omni 20 Plus at 45W or output up to 100W for laptops and the like. It supports four modes, between 5 and 20V with up to 5A of output current. 100W is more than enough to charge up anything with an internal battery.

For your smaller gadgets, the Omni 20 Plus has two 18W Quick Charge 3.0 USB-A ports on the front and a single USB-C port on the back, which supports USB Power Delivery for up to 60W. When it comes to USB gadgets, charging standards vary widely with no guarantees that you’ll get fast charging speeds from any given port. So we’ve done some deeper testing of the USB ports and gadget compatibility to see how good the Omni 20 Plus really is.

The USB-A ports offer Quick Charge, Apple, and Samsung charging support (see the table below), ensuring support for a wide range of gadgets that use various standards. The USB-C port doesn’t support the very latest USB Programmable Power Supply protocol used to fast charge phones like Samsung’s Galaxy S21 series that little bit faster, but works with the more common Power Delivery standard. When it comes to the latest smartphones and laptops, you’ll get the fastest speeds from the USB-C port, so I wish there were two of them. If you have lots of USB-C gadgets, you might be better off with the Omni 20c Plus model. Still, two fast-charging USB-A ports are great for a wide range of other gadgets that rely on the various other charging standards out there.

I also tested out the 10W wireless charging capabilities. Like most wireless chargers, there’s a sweet spot for positioning your gadget and the Omni 20+ is quite picky. While our Google Pixel 5 and Apple iPhone 12 charged up at 10W in the sweet spot, I couldn’t achieve the same speeds with the Samsung Galaxy S21 in any position. Another minor complaint is that the surface is very smooth, which can cause phones with glass backs and large camera housing to slip off the pad and stop charging. A grippier surface would be better.

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To round out our testing I also charged up multiple gadgets at once. It took three smartphones (two on USB-A and one wireless charging), along with a laptop plugged into the USB-C port to draw a peak of 107W, which the Omni 20 Plus was able to provide without issue. Although this caused temperatures to creep above 40oC hitting a rather warm peak of 52.6oC before I decided to stop charging. Fortunately, the display allows you to keep an eye on how warm the Omni is getting. Charging two laptops at once (one via USB-C and the other over the AC port) or three phones over USB and an AC laptop attempted to draw 130W and caused the AC port to automatically turn off.

There are limitations when drawing obscene amounts of power from the battery pack, but that’s to be expected. The Omni 20 Plus won’t exceed 110W when charging multiple sources but that will be enough power for the vast majority of use cases. If you need more power than that, you really should be plugged into a wall socket.

What I like about the Omni 20 Plus

• The huge range of charging options. With ample USB ports, an AC, and a DC plug, there’s no gadget the Omni 20 Plus can’t charge.
• The little OLED display. It’s a nice extra touch to help monitor charging speeds and temperature.
• Wireless charging. No-one likes getting tangled up with cables, so the ability to charge smaller gadgets wirelessly is much appreciated.
• The compact design. The Omni 20 Plus is pretty good looking for a battery pack, fits nicely into a laptop bag, and is reasonably lightweight.

What I don’t like

• Battery capacity could be a little bigger. 20,000mAh will be enough for most people, but it’s only enough for a single laptop charge. Then again, a bigger battery would be heavier.
• Finicky wireless charging. The smooth plastic surface doesn’t agree with slippery glass smartphones, causing some of them to slide out of the wireless charging sweet spot.

Omni 20 Plus review: The verdict

At $199, the Omni 20 Plus is not targeting the same market as your everyday $30 battery pack. If you’re after something to keep your phone topped up throughout the day or on a weekend camping trip, this product is almost certainly overkill.

Instead, the Omni 20 Plus comes into its own for the traveler who needs to charge a wide range of high-power gadgets, such as laptops and cameras. Photographers and videographers who want to ensure a day or two of continuous shooting, long haul business travelers, and journalists who don’t want duel for trade-shows outlets will get their money’s worth here.

You can find AC and USB-C chargers with larger capacities that don’t cost quite as much, but Omnicharge’s Omni 20 Plus is more compact, lightweight, and supports a wider range of sockets and standards than others on the market. It’s not bad looking either, and its battery capacity, while not the largest around, is enough for most use cases while remaining slim and portable.

See also: The best portable chargers and power banks in 2021

Overall, the Omnicharge Omni 20 Plus is a very robust product for the demanding gadget user. I’ll certainly be taking one on the road with me once the world gets back to traveling.

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