Intelli ScoutPro Portable Charger Review: Just Too Much

Who Is The Intelli ScoutPro Portable Charger For?

• The Intelli ScoutPro is designed to charge up to five different devices at once
• The ScoutPro comes with built-in MagSafe features for iPhone and Apple Watch owners
• The Intelli ScoutPro has enough juice to power a laptop

We want to take our electronics with us wherever we go, but can often be held back by a lack of electricity. There needs to be some source of power if you want to use a laptop out in the wilderness for more than a few hours. While there are a number of options available for portable power, Intelli has revealed its ScoutPro. The ScoutPro intends to be the ultimate source of portable power, but can it live up to those lofty goals?

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A Big Boy

The Intelli ScoutPro is not a small portable charger. At over an inch thick and weighing over one pound, this charger feels like a giant compared to all the other portable chargers I've used in the past. While all this bulk makes lugging the ScoutPro around somewhat annoying, it does allow the portable charger to have a massive power storage capacity. The ScoutPro can hold 20,000 mAh of power, which is at least twice the amount that most other chargers hold.

This large size also allows up to five devices to be charged at once. That said, getting all five charge ports up and running requires two devices that can be charged wirelessly. Only three devices can be charged at a time via wired cables.

Can the Intelli ScoutPro fit in my back pocket, as the Kickstarter campaign claims? Yes, it can, but it does stick out of the top a little bit. Could I sit down or do anything physical beyond walking around with the ScoutPro in my back pocket? No.

Not All Chargers Work The Same

The Intelli ScoutPro has five different ways to charge devices. There are two USB-C ports, one standard USB port, a wireless charging area for phones and a wireless charging area for smart watches. The three USB ports all work as expected, but the wireless charging areas aren't as reliable.

The two wireless charging areas on the ScoutPro have MagSafe features, meaning they were designed with the newest line of Apple products in mind. I don't have access to any Apple products with MagSafe features, so I can't verify if these do work. I do notice a little magnetic pull when using other cell phones, but it isn't strong enough to hold a cell phone tightly to the charger.

The big issue with these wireless charging areas is that they don't really work, at least with the five different phones I tried. At best, my phone started to charge several seconds after being put onto the charging area, much longer than any other wireless charger takes to activate. I have three other wireless chargers available right now that all work as intended, so it can't be the phones I'm using. At worst, the wireless charging just doesn't work. Regardless of what phone I use, how I position it on the charger or how long I wait, the wireless charging frequently does not kick in.

The wired USB ports, however, all work surprisingly well. One of the phones I'm using to test the Intelli ScoutPro is the OnePlus 9, which has what it calls "Warp charging." This feature allows the OnePlus 9 to be charged insanely fast, though it does require specific chargers for the feature to activate. Using the USB port on the ScoutPro activated the Warp charging in the OnePlus 9, something no other portable charger I've used before has been able to do.

Drain Times

A big battery is only useful if it can last for a long time, and the Intelli ScoutPro is somewhat hit and miss here. Charging cell phones doesn't seem to make a dent in the overall storage capacity, allowing me to fully charge my phone several times before I need to recharge the ScoutPro itself.

However, using the ScoutPro to power a laptop resulted in the ScoutPro battery draining incredibly quickly. When using the ScoutPro with a Macbook Pro, the ScoutPro kept the Macbook at full charge for about an hour and 15 minutes before becoming completely drained.

The Intelli ScoutPro has pass through abilities, allowing the ScoutPro to charge devices while being charged itself. This does help keep the ScoutPro running for a longer time, but at that point you could probably just use a charger for whatever device you are using instead of the ScoutPro.

As for the recharge speeds on the ScoutPro, that's a bit of an unknown. Intelli says the ScoutPro can be fully charged in under an hour when using a 100W charger. If you, like myself, don't have access to one, the ScoutPro will take several hours to charge instead. Additionally, the ScoutPro's battery indicator never shows that it is fully charged, instead keeping the final battery level indicator blinking indefinitely. It makes it impossible to tell when the charger is actually full or when it still needs more time to get to 100 percent.

Confusing Kickstarter

There are two models of the ScoutPro, but oddly enough only one is currently available through Intelli's Kickstarter campaign. The ScoutPro has 20,000 mAh, while the ScoutPro Max has 24,000 mAh. That means the ScoutPro Max is the only device that can be purchased as of right now. I imagine once the Kickstarter campaign has concluded, both the ScoutPro and ScoutPro Max will be available to purchase from Intelli.

Steep Price

There's another aspect of the Intelli ScoutPro that needs to be discussed, which is its seemingly massive price tag. The standard ScoutPro will retail for $200 once the Kickstarter campaign has ended, and the ScoutPro Max's price tag will jump up to over $300. While the ScoutPro Max has some massive discounts for early Kickstarter adopters, that's still a ton of money for a portable charger.

For example, a pack of two 10,000 mAh chargers can be bought on Amazon right now for $20. Combined, that's the same amount of power as the regular ScoutPro, for one tenth the price. Of course, those Amazon chargers don't include the wireless features or the Warp Charging support, but seeing as how the wireless charging doesn't really work that's kind of a wash.

Final Thoughts

The Intelli ScoutPro claims it can charge up to five devices at once, but that requires two of the devices to use wireless charging. Seeing as how the wireless charging doesn't work, that makes the ScoutPro only capable of charging three devices at a time.

If you are in the market for a massive portable charger that can power up a laptop for a short period of time or provide several charges for phones and tablets, the Intelli ScoutPro can be the charger for you. That said, there are a number of less expensive options available that also do most of, if not all, of the same things the ScoutPro is capable of.

The Intelli ScoutPro Max is currently available through Kickstarter.