One charger to rule them all

Whenever I go away from home I have to gather together a combination of chargers and cables. There’s the microUSB charger for my phone and the proprietary battery charger for my camera. Then, if I am carrying a second phone, which is often the case, I might need miniUSB or some other charge cable. Music player? That’s an Apple special – another cable is needed.

Invariably there are one or two other bits of kit lurking in my travel bag which may or may not be charged using the combination of cables above, or need their own.

I’ve got a good DIY arrangement to deal with this. It involves retractable USB charge cables, a number of conversion tips and a small plastic food tub.

But when the laptop drops itself into the equation I have to carry its power supply too and that adds a bulky, weighty additional element to proceedings.

The Innergie mCube Pro can do away with some of the cable and charger mess and deliver a slightly more tidy and flexible solution which ought to be versatile enough to be future proof.

It is chunky, but no chunkier than the average notebook power supply and it’ll charge a myriad of things if you carry the right tips and adaptors with it. The charger comes with a zip carry pouch that I’ve found adequately sized for everything I need.

At the power-in end you’ve got the choice of mains, car power adaptor or airplane and for the DC of the latter two sources you pull off a smallish section of the main unit and use just that. When charging a laptop from the mains you need to fiddle with the voltage settings. The charger copes with 15V – 21V so check your laptop doesn’t fall outside this range before buying.

You get ten tips of different sizes and I found something that worked with every laptop I had sitting around in the office. The ‘small kit’ items such as phones are well catered for by a USB connector which means you can use the Apple, miniUSB, microUSB or other charge cables you need too, though you may need tips for the device end of that equation and none are provided.

Of course all this does add up to a fair bit of cabling you are carrying around, and the main unit itself is not small or light at 128.8mm x 70mm x 23.6mm x 263g. But it is a little more ergonomic than the norm.

More information here.