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Stylish Wireless iPhone Charging for a Premium – Review Geek


Rating:
7.5/10
?

  • 1 – Absolute Hot Garbage
  • 2 – Sorta Lukewarm Garbage
  • 3 – Strongly Flawed Design
  • 4 – Some Pros, Lots Of Cons
  • 5 – Acceptably Imperfect
  • 6 – Good Enough to Buy On Sale
  • 7 – Great, But Not Best-In-Class
  • 8 – Fantastic, with Some Footnotes
  • 9 – Shut Up And Take My Money
  • 10 – Absolute Design Nirvana

Price: $69.99

Logitech Powered wireless charger with an iPhone 8 resting on it
Logitech

If you’re looking for a very stylish wireless iPhone charger and you don’t mind paying a bit of a premium, the Logitech Powered wireless charger not only looks good but functions as a handy landscape-friendly cradle.

Here’s What We Like

  • Great looking
  • Designed specifically for the iPhone
  • Supports iPhone fast charging
  • Comfortable landscape mode
  • Easy to seat your phone without fussing

And What We Don’t

  • Expensive
  • Hardwired cable
  • 5w charging for non-iPhones
  • Requires thin or open-bottom case

The biggest inertia the Powered wireless charger has to overcome is resistance to the price tag. The design is sharp, but at $70—sold exclusively through Logitech’s website and Apple—you definitely want to be sure you’re getting your monies worth out of it. Let’s breakdown what we loved and didn’t love about the stand.

Designed for the iPhone

The Powered wireless charger is a Qi charger offering from Logitech that is styled, clearly, to pair with the iPhone platform. The stand features a pure white design with gentle curves that make it look like it was birthed directly out of a piece of Apple packaging.

In addition, the curvature of the cradle bottom is designed to make it easy to drop your phone in without fussing over placement (to that end it’s very useful).  It features a lightly rubberized surface to keep your iPhone seated in place, a cradle notch so you can place your iPhone vertically or horizontally (more on that in a moment), and 7.5w of charing power to hit the maximum charging capacity of your wireless-charge capable iPhone (which is any phone iPhone 8 and above including the X, XS, XR, and large variants.)

We’ve said iPhone a lot so far and that’s because unless you’re buying the Powered for anything but an iPhone you’re making a mistake. While you can put any Qi-capable phone on the cradle so long as its charging coils line up roughly with the center of the pad it only charges at 7.5w when paired with an iPhone and maxes out at 5w when paired with any other Qi-capable phone. If you’re looking for a wireless charging cradle that will work well for a multi-platform household the Powered is a poor choice because it’ll leave your Samsung, or similar, phone wanting for power.

Logitech Powered charging stand with an iPhone unlocking via FaceID
Logitech

For an iPhone-centric household, however, the cradle is undeniable sharp looking and a compelling pick for anybody looking to get away from the black-on-black industrial look of many charging stands. Further, if strict adherence to Apple’s design standards is important to you the Powered is one of the few charging stands on the market, outside of some other premium options like the Belkin Boostup, designed with Apple oversight to ensure the charging coil design doesn’t interfere with the iPhone’s radios. Among other design considerations, the cradles leans back at not just a pleasant viewing angle but a great angle for smooth FaceID unlocks.

Landscape Is Surprisingly Practical

Speaking of viewing angles: I use the iPhone wireless charging almost exclusively for my iPhone by placing it flat on my nightstand at the end of the day and sitting in a cradle on my desk during working hours. While landscape mode charging isn’t high on my list of must-have features, the stand is designed very well for that end and I certainly appreciated how well it worked as a landscape-oriented cradle.

A lot of stands on the market offer landscape mode by placing two coils in the stand back (so that whether the phone is horizontal or vertical the internal coil in the phone lines up roughly with one or the other). The end result is that your phone is landscape but it’s sitting very lower to surface it is on, almost as if it’s propped up using a kickstand.

The horizontal cradle arms on the Powered stand only raise the phone up 2 inches off the surface but that (combined with a pleasant viewing angle) makes a surprising amount of difference compared to resting the just barely off the surface of the desk. It also offers a nice perch if you use your iPhone as an alarm clock on your nightstand.

Cases Matter and the Wiring Choices Are Odd

One of the things specified in the fine print for the Powered stand is that the cases should be 3mm (or less) in thickness. That’s not uncommon and a pretty basic requirement for wireless charging. One of the odd details is that the case should be open at the bottom (like Apple’s first-party leather case). Presumably, this is so the phone will sit precisely in the cradle, but practically speaking the end outcome is kind of odd.

For example, when I put my iPhone 8 Plus with a fairly thick Speck case on it in the vertical orientation it wouldn’t charge in the cradle. Yet if I flipped the phone upside down in the cradle (Home button up instead of down) it would charge fine. Clearly, the precision placement of the coils might be a bit too precise if a few millimeters up from the base throws off the charging but flipping the phone completely upside down doesn’t. The thicker case had absolutely no effect on charging in the horizontal orientation despite the bumper thickness on the sides of the case matching the thickness on the bottom and top.

The other odd choice is the way the charger is wired. The charging cable is hard-wired into the stand itself, terminated in a barrel plug, and only pairs with the included transformer. At this price point and in age, we’d expect the wiring setup on the stand to have a detachable wire, use USB-C, and be paired with a nice wall charger. While it’s great (and expected) that they include a quality wall charger, the choices they made mean that if the wire is damaged you have to replace the whole unit and if you lose the transformer you’re forced to contact Logitech to get a device specific replacement mailed out.

Is that a deal breaker? Probably not. Most likely you’ll unpack the Powered, plug it in, and it might move again once or twice in the life cycle of the product. Unless your pet decides the wire looks delicious, realistically, you probably won’t need to worry about the wire. Still, if version two of the product comes along we’d like to see a standard connection with a detachable wire.

But to return to the point we opened the review on: the Powered is a stylish stand. If you’re looking for a really sharp stand to pair with your iPhone and you want to capture some the Apple design vibe, the premium price is probably palatable and comes not just with good looks but solid construction too—curious charger choices aside.

Rating: 7.5/10

Price: $69.99

Here’s What We Like

  • Great looking
  • Designed specifically for the iPhone
  • Supports iPhone fast charging
  • Comfortable landscape mode
  • Easy to seat your phone without fussing

And What We Don’t

  • Expensive
  • Hardwired cable
  • 5w charging for non-iPhones
  • Requires thin or open-bottom case



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