Gallium Nitride (GaN) technology has made chargers a fraction of the size of silicon-based models only a couple of years old, and once considered small themselves.

This desktop charger from Nektek has a shorter (1m) extension cable than the Ugreen Nexode desktop charger, and it has some limitations but it does offer great value for money. USB-Cs flea sized connectors have proven themselves to be really reliable, even in the real world on cheap equipment using maybe counterfeit parts, which is something many connectors don’t have, things like 1/4″ are only reliable with high quality cables. Most any braided C with a strain relief will probably last years. And you really can’t easily see if you have the wrong one – the quagmire that USB has become means the cable may well be working perfectly for data but won’t do the voltage negotiation BS properly so doesn’t actually provide the right power at all – but the host device won’t know or care, to it its just an older spec USB cable doing its thing. And even if it does pop up that freindly message of ‘this cable is shit or the power supply too weedy’ you then have to spend ages cycling through the heap of these damn cables looking for the one that isn’t broken yet and actually was built to spec in the first place…It’s quite easy to provide overvoltage protections inside a USB-C device, I’ve done it! Add a crowbar with a zener, or one of those “protect from overvoltage” chips, problem solved.

The two USB-A ports are handy as most of us still have devices that require a charging cable connection into this old standard. Each can handle 12W charging but that capacity is shared between the two ports so will be lower if both are in use. This is fine if you are charging one phone or two lower-powered devices such as headphones or watch. USB-C also lets you implement digital signing for device validity verification. If you can read between the lines, it smells of DRM, and that’s what it is. Some device manufacturers, especially from the HP/Dell/Lenovo dark triad, will implement DRM that makes their laptop throttle its CPU if the charger or the cable is third-party – even if it’s all the same 100 W. It sort of makes sense when Dell does that in cases where they push 6A through a verified-to-work combination of charger, cable, and laptop. But at this point, let’s be fair, the conscientious choice would’ve been to go for EPR and 140 W instead, and throttling is inexcusable either way.

The UK three-pin model, which has a different design to those available in the US and EU—necessarily so, because the elongated design and sheer weight (268g for the UK model) of this thing would likely have trouble staying attached to the wall without that third prong to steady itself. The 8.29oz (235g) US model has a taller, more rectangular design, with folding plugs to make them more compact for travel, but the core specs are otherwise the same. On the downside, there is only one output, which means you can charge only one device at a time and it’ll need to support USB-C.