iClever is a company that provides charging solutions. Last week, I reviewed their three port charger, that puts out a solid 2.4 amps out of each port. Not bad. This week, I’m reviewing something different from them, which is a single port wall charging unit that supports Quick Charge. The prongs fold in, just like the other one, making this well suited for travel. It is color black instead of white, but is otherwise identical in seize and shape. On one of the broad sides, it contains the same company logo, and sports a Quick Charge detail on the opposite side
I retained the charging info from last month, so I had a baseline for comparative purposes. To save people from clicking around to find it, my phone (stock Nexus 6 rocking 6.0.1) charged a little over 20% in about half an hour. My tablet (stock NVidia Shield, LTE variant, running 5.1.1) picked up a little under 20% percent during the same half hour window of time. iClever’s unit will quick charge supported devices (such as my phone), and pumps out 2.1 amps for non supported (the tablet). What’s nice about this is that it works with three generations of Quick Charging technology, so even though it boasts being Quick Charge 3, it is backward compatible with gens 1 and 2… good thing for my phone, which has the latter built in.
Not knowing how much it would charge in thirty minutes, I ran my phone down pretty good, to 14%. I gave it my standard thirty minutes, and saw that it was bumped up to 51%. Now I have no idea if that’s par for Quick Charge or not, but it’s clearly an appreciable difference over what the 2.4 amp charging provides. In the case of my tablet, the charge was nearly the same at 2.1 amps, oddly enough. It received a 20% charge in thirty minutes. In each case, I left the screen off as much as I could, save for checking the timer running on the device, two or three times. By doing this, I noticed a couple of things. First, it was quite obvious that the Quick Charge feature was making a difference in my phone. Second, the non Quick Charge output was functionally similar at 2.1 amps to what I saw at 2.4 amps on a different BoostCube. Lastly, it has an LED to indicate the charging status. It’s located below where the USB cable plugs in, and shows green if it’s Quick Charging, and blue if it’s standard.
In the end, this isn’t bad, for a single port charger. The Quick Charge worked quite well. On the other hand,the stats for the non Quick Charging output were bit disappointing, at least on paper. On the gripping hand, the drop off wasn’t appreciable, so there was no performance hit while the device was charging idly. In light of that, I can’t really knock them for it. I was ready to be disappointed with its standard output, and that wasn’t the case. So if you’re looking for a travel charger that supports Quick Charge, this isn’t a bad choice, save for its sole port. If you have only one device you’re concerned with, and it supports Quick Charge, this isn’t a bad option.
