I’m always looking to optimize my load out when I travel anywhere, and cutting down on the amount of dumb cables, chargers, and all the other associated crap that takes up too much of your bag space that you need to keep the things you actually want to bring going. Thankfully, with the advent of nearly everything being charged over USB these days, this is a lot easier than it used to be when proprietary wall warts ended up taking up half your backpack.
The last piece to the puzzle of total packing zen was combining all the single USB chargers I used to use into one charger that has tons of USB ports on it. So, I headed to Amazon and after a bit of research it seemed that the Anker brand of power accessories fell perfectly in the sweet spot of low prices and high overall review scores. Cooler yet, they’ve got chargers that satiate basically any charging need you have with chargers with any number of ports.
Here’s the lineup:
- Anker 20W 2-Port USB Wall Charger with Foldable Plug and PowerIQ Technology
- Anker 36W 4-Port USB Wall Charger Travel Adapter with PowerIQ Technology
- Anker PowerPort 6 (60W 6-Port USB Charging Hub) Multi-Port USB Charger with PowerIQ Technology
I ended up grabbing the 6 port model for my bedside table where I typically charge a ton of junk overnight, and the 4 port model for my backpack which works out pretty well as I’ve typically got my iPhone, iPad, 3DS, and Apple Watch to charge when I’m staying somewhere. Better yet, this “PowerIQ" stuff that’s being boasted in the title of every Amazon page is a fancy buzzword they use to basically say that it’ll intelligently detect the maximum charge rates of each device plugged in, and give them as much juice as they can take.
This is particularly useful for people who have an iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus. For these phones, Apple shipped the typical 1A chargers they’ve been including in the box of basically every recent iPhone. What Apple doesn’t tell you is that you can charge your iPhone 6 / 6 Plus almost twice as fast with an 2.1A iPad charger, as the new iPhones are capable of sucking down even more power than previous models to charge up faster. Seems like a weird oversight on Apple’s part to not include a charger that charges your phone as quickly as possible, but, hey, it’s Apple.
So, yeah. Posting about chargers is a little weird for us, but I’ve been so happy with these things I figured I’d let other people know. If you’ve similarly got a bunch of USB devices and a mess of random chargers, you can kill two birds with one stone in uncluttering a bunch and getting better charging performance. That seems like a pretty good way to spend $20-30, at least in my book.
