Review: Bestek’s flex lamp with USB charger

Purchase
  Bestek, the online retailer of electronic goods, has recently sent me a lamp for review. On the whole, I like the lamp and I’m glad to have gotten to use it. It’s more flexible than a similar one that I own, but it does have  its flaws. So, let’s see how the last several days have gone for me.
  The appearance  of the lamp is nice, but not  without a cost. It’s almost completely black, save for some brand markings, the icons and  indicators, and the bulb proper. The black coloring is somewhat glossy, so it’s worth noting that this lamp is an absolute magnet for dust and fingerprints. I was a bit surprised at how much of those it collected within the week that I used it. The unit has a base that’s square in shape, and is fairly heavy to keep the unit from tipping. The lamp can swivel at four different points; cylindrically at the base, back and fourth at the two ends of the main “neck”, and it can swivel side to side, should users desire to locate the lamp to their left or right, and yet have whatever is being worked on or read to be illuminated. All told, it provides a range of flexibility that won’t be mistaken for a goose-neck, but shouldn’t lack for utility. Along the base are several indicators, arrayed in two rows. The farther set of the two contains five icons, with the rightmost being an hour long timer, while the remaining four control the coloring of the lamp; the colors range from a bright and sterile white, to a softer light with a slight yellow/tan tinge to it that’s soft on the eyes and aptly dubbed “sleep”. The row nearest the user containing a power toggle on the far left, while each dot to its right indicates a successively brighter, so with the power toggle doubling as the lowest brightness setting, each of the four colors also has a spectrum of brightness. It should be worth noting that, being capacitive buttons, finding the power button in the dark wasn’t that difficult, considering I merely had to brush my fingers over the corner of the base were the button lay, and the lamp turned on.
  As for functionality, most of the time it lived up to its billing.. So long as it remained plugged in (being a desk lamp, that will be the case just about all the time), it can be fired up and it will resume the last used color and brightness setting. This is quite handy if you plan on using it one way for the majority of the time. Keeping it on my bedside table, having it power on and off from the softest color and lowest brightness was nice. Should the lamp need to be unplugged for any reason though, it will default to a hard-coded color and brightness; this happens ever time (though without a battery backup of some kind, it comes as no surprise). Second, if you chance colors for any reason your previous level of brightness isn’t restored. For whatever reason, each color has a pre-set level of brightness, and the “memory” doesn’t seem to apply to it; this was a bit of a head scratcher for me, in all honesty. The other utilitarian facet of this lamp is that one side of the base contains a Type A USB charging port that’s 5v/2.4amp. .My tablet (stock Shield running M with a 5,200 mAh battery) picked up around a twenty percent charge in as many minutes, while my phone (stock Moto Z Play running 7.0 on a 3,5100 mAh battery) picked up around eight percent; this seems to be on par with other chargers I’ve used with these devices.
  So for what this lamp does, it does well. I like it’s hinged flexibility, and it was stable to never fall over when fully extended in any single direction. I like both charging port, as well as the granular control over how it looks and how brightly it shines. I even appreciate that it’s black. The fact that it smudges and gets dusty quite swiftly does mean it’ll likely be demanding cleaning sooner than one would like, and more often at that. I also expected the memory of the lamp to retain previously used brightness levels for each style, while it was plugged in, so that’s a disappointment. All considered though, the good really outweighs the bad, so I’m giving it an 8.
8

Great

Ryan is married with two kids, and loves heavy metal and super hot Buffalo wings

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