Top positive review
4.0 out of 5 starsAmazing single port travel charger, 3 port power budget is unusable
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 16, 2023
First off, the charger is an amazing tool for traveling, replacing my laptop charger and phone charger. The size and single port performance to push 100W is amazing. The product has a sturdy construction and Anker as a brand has always been a reliable product for me.
The reason I am knocking off a star is that the power budget in the multiport setup is shared in a terrible fashion and the unit's "intelligence" does not actually exist. The USB-C port 1 can handle 100W and can "balance" with USB-C port 2 for a total of 120W. You realize there is no real balancing going on when trying to use USB-A port 3. If you plug in port 3 with port 2 plugged in the unit shuts off after a few minutes. This seems to be because, in this configurations you only get 24W available which is 1w shy of enough to actually use both ports properly. I tested by having a small 5W USB-A device on port 3 and an iPhone 12 on port 2, in this scenario I expected the charger to provision 5W for the USB-A and leave 15-19W for USB-C. Instead the unit must try to push 20W to the USB-C port and 5W to the USB-A port which overloads the 24W capacity and shuts down the unit, every time regardless of if port 1 is empty. The fact that charger will shut off instead of just limiting port 2 to 15W is frustrating and functionally means this is a two port charger that has 100W available for port 1 and 20W available for either port 2 or port 3. For this quirk, I knocked off 1 star, though I guess if you had 2 devices with hard limits at 5W you could use all three ports.
