Cheap USB Charger

Just to follow up my earlier post on the sad state of USB charging standards, here’s the USB charger that I bought. Despite its cheapness and lack of any indication of its compatibility or compliance with any sort of standards, this USB charger actually does charge an iPad pretty well, even while the iPad is being used.

How sad, isn’t it, that a cheap gadget actually does just what we want it to do. Never mind the nonsense about USB-IF Battery Charging standards. What point is there to support a standard if a product doesn’t actually work the way customers expect it to work.

This two-port USB charger was picked up from a Qoo10 seller. One port outputs 2.1A, while the other will do 1A. I’ve tested that it does charge both my handphone and my iPad simultaneously.

As you can see in the photo, the adapter itself looks pretty much like an Apple power brick.

As you can see in the photo above, a variety of adapters for various international power socket types were included. They look and attach just like Apple’s own design. Very handy if you are planning to take this USB charger on an overseas trip.

Here’s a close up of the USB ports.

The ports are labelled 1A and 2.1A, so you know which is the higher powered one that you need to use to connect to the iPad.

The box you can see in the first photo looks like something designed by Apple. The charger itself looks somewhat like something of Apple’s design. But the most important thing is that it actually works. It’s pretty good value for money.