The Basics:

As you would expect this device is very simple from the end users perspective; what’s going on inside is a different story. Overall the device is pretty low profile and sticks out of a 12V source about an inch with the two ports facing straight out from the 12V source. As you see in the image below one port is green and the other is orange. The green port is the AiPower port and is labeled as 3A and the orange port has the Qualcomm Quick Charge logo. What is somewhat confusing is the 3A rating for the AiPower port since the spec indicates it has a dedicated 2.4A PSU. Maybe this is to designate the minimum rating for the cable. Overall the device feels solidly built unlike some of those chargers on ebay that feel like they are about to pop apart.



Setup:

As one would expect the set up of this device is as easy as they come unless you are anal like me. For most all you will do is pop this in a port and charge your devices. My installation requires me to route the cables through the dashboard since I hate loose cables. But one thing you really have to keep in mind is the cables you use. While the device comes with a quality cable capable of the voltages/currents I needed a USB C cable as well. Even if your current device is not Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0 capable I would suggest making sure the cable you buy is. It won’t cost much more and you won’t have to worry about overloading the wire in the future.

Performance:

I like many people had a ton of these car chargers; often they come as part of a package with a case or as a promotional item from some random company. Well this summer on vacation I found out why it is worth getting a quality charger. While on a road trip I was approaching a confusing interchange and when I looked at my phone for guidance I realized it had shutdown. As I managed my way through by memory I had my wife check out what was going on. Turned out the “charger” I was using couldn’t supply enough power to even maintain the battery with the screen on and GPS running. The rest of the vacation I was forced to shut the screen off between turns, even doing this I saw a general decline in battery level through the day. From that point I realized I needed to get a quality charger that could at a bare minimum maintain the battery with heavy use and hopefully charge too. I had forgotten about it for a bit then I saw a deal on Amazon for the AUKEY CC-T7 for less than $8 and had to pull the trigger.

I don’t currently have any devices that support the Qualcomm standard but figured it couldn’t hurt to have a device that was capable of doing this going forward and with the device’s 2 year warranty it is likely I will have this for quite a while. So for testing purposes I used a Moto G3, a Nexus 5X and several Kindle tablets. All of the devices tested on the AiPower port showed they were charging as if they were plugged into an AC power source. As you can see in the screen cap below, a Moto G3 the charging rate is very good. In fact on my 1 hour commute home the battery went from 35% to 79%. So the next test was done with the G3 again but this time I had GPS running and the screen at full brightness the entire time. As you can see the phone still was able to pack in a little charge even with the device in constant operation; starting at 63% and reaching 85% in an hour. This is about half the rate I had previously but this is a nice piece of mind knowing I can use the device and still add charge at the same time.



Next up was testing the Nexus 5X. Here to I found the device reported charging on AC power. Since this is the wife’s phone I didn’t have the luxury of testing the charging for an hour on the ride home, but as you can see in the screen cap below the phone was reporting it would be fully charged in 1 hour 6 min from 38% which comes out to about 56% per hour. Quite a bit faster than the Moto G3 was charging at.