I dug a bit into Omnicharge this evening and I’d recommend steering clear of this Indiegogo (IGG) campaign.
Totally agree that the updated specs and current backer price are promising. Their promo video is also very slick. However, it’s relatively easy to create those things with a modest marketing budget and much more difficult to actually follow through and deliver a reliable product. Side note: the video is sort of ridiculous and likely involves a non-functioning mock-up of the product. Camping, kayaking, fancy cooking, drones, photo shoot …. and horses?!?? Who actually lives like that?
The good news is if you back this product, you’ll likely receive something. Omnicharge has three previous Indiegogo campaigns and with each campaign, it appears most backers received a product. Also good is that actual delivery timing appears to have been consistent with their original schedule!
The bad news is Omnicharge appears to have product reliability issues. It also appears that they’ve significantly inflated their MSRP on Indiegogo and their eventual price on Amazon is not much higher than their perk pricing.
Let’s look at their two most recent campaigns/product launches:
#1: The Omni Ultimate launched on IGG in September 2018 and ended up with 5,553 total backers. The product appears to have shipped to backers between December 2018 and April 2019 which looks to be consistent with their schedule. The campaign now has over 2000 comments. I certainly didn’t read through them all but recent comments note communication problems (e.g. refunds not issued, product not received) and lots of issues with the product failing.
To be fair, from looking at IGG alone, it’s tough to tell how widespread issues are with any product. Commenters could be a vocal minority. Also, every electronic product has SOME reliability problems and many other IGG campaigns suffer from communication problems.
To get a more quantitative view of the product’s value and quality, I looked at the listing for the Omni Ultimate on Amazon. It was first available on Amazon on 7/15/19, just a few months after shipping to backers. The IGG backer price was $349 (with a stated MSRP of $599). On Amazon, for the past year, you could buy it for between $370 and $399. It even appears to have been $319.99 for Black Friday 2019, cheaper than the backer pricing! In other words, backers did not save a significant amount of money over retail purchasers. The Ultimate has 51 ratings, with 10% of the reviews awarding a 1 or 2 star rating.
#2: The Omni Mobile launched on IGG in January 2019 and ended up with 3,371 total backers. The product appears to have shipped to backers between April 2019 and May 2019 which again appears to be relatively on-time. The campaign now has over 819 comments, again many citing issues with the product. Two recent reviews note how the product began to smoke!
The 25600mah version of the product first became available on Amazon on 6/5/19. The IGG backer price for this model was $99 (with a stated MSRP of $149). On Amazon, for the past year, you could buy it for between $123 and $129. During 2019’s Black Friday season, it appears to been on sale for $104. The Mobile 25600mah has 178 ratings, with 13% of the reviews awarding a 1 or 2 star rating. Many of these reviews cite various product failures.
Compare Omnicharge's popularity and product ratings to other power banks on Amazon. For example, the Anker PowerCore Essential 20000mAh model has 22,403 ratings and only 2% 1 or 2 star ratings.
In other words, there appears to be little reason to back this product on IGG. You MAY save a little money but you run some significant risk of receiving a device with reliability issues. Based on their product history, since the retail price is unlikely to be significantly higher, it would seem the smarter move is to wait for the product to hit retail, review the final specs, wait for testing/reviews, and then make a purchasing decision.