Review: Belkin & Kensington chargers

review by Bill Palmer

Car chargers are car chargers, right? Pick the one with the best price, or the most attractive styling, or the brand name you feel the most comfortable with, and be done with it. That’s the logic that has held true for iPhone and iPod car charging products for years. While we’ve seen variations with aux ports and dual-device ports over the years, the bottom line is that it’s not been a complicated equation; at the end of the day you’re going to have a bulbous entity protruding from your car’s power socket. Except wait a minute, those bulbous protrusions are suddenly no more, thanks to new products Belkin and Kensington.



I don’t know how they did it, and I don’t care. It makes me wonder, sarcastically, if the big bulgy blobs on the front of every iPod or iPhone charger to come to market were just there for show. Because now all the sudden the big bulbs are no longer part of the equation. Instead these new car chargers, once plugged in, sit nearly flush with the lip of your car’s power socket, making them essentially invisible during use. And based on my tests, there’s no tangible difference during use. They don’t take longer to charge your device than the oversized car chargers do, and while I’d been skeptical about whether it might be tricky to remove the tiny stubs from the power socket, it turns out they each stick out just enough millimeters to be yanked out easily with your fingertips.



It’s very rare that we hand out five star ratings for any product as inexpensive as these, as a sub-$20 price tag nearly always means some corner was cut somewhere. But these devices are game-changers. With the exception of chargers that offer additional ports or functionality, there’s now no reason to recommend any car charger that isn’t as tiny as these. The two products are nearly identical. But if we were handing out awards (actually, we will be soon), I’d give the nod to the Kensington because in addition to the $19 charger-plus-cable product, there’s also a $9 charger-only option and a $29 charger-plus-cable-plus-wall-charger combo package. But you can’t go wrong with the Belkin product either.

Learn more about the Kensington charger at Kensington.com.

Learn more about the Belkin charger at Belkin.com.