Power Wave II Stand Review

There have been a few of these posted already, but here is my contribution to the mix.

First up, and this is the main takeaway - I love how easy it is to get my phone to start charging on this. Unlike my older PowerPort Qi, which is a small round charger that requires fairly precise phone placement, this one is very forgiving. If the phone isn’t going to fall off of the stand, it will charge. And when I am dropping it onto the charger at bedtime while already half asleep, that is a huge help. It was not true of my older Qi charger, which is flat, small and circular, and made it easy to miss the charging zone if you weren’t centered.

Both my Galaxy S7 and my Galaxy S9 show fast charging wirelessly as soon as they are placed on the charger. And charge time estimates were noticeably faster than on the older Qi only charger. But this isn’t fast charging like a QC2 or 3 charger, at 10-15W with 2A and 5V or 1.6A and 9V. This is more like 1.1A @5V or 5.5W. Which is better than you could get out of most wired chargers a few years back, but this isn’t your go to for getting ready to leave the house in 15 minutes and your phone is almost dead. Stick to wired for that. But for those with a phone dying a little sooner than they would like after lunch, this will charge on your desk through the afternoon and leave you ready to go out in the evening full charged (once this quarantine ends, anyway).

For comparison, this routinely charged my phone at 4.5-5.5W. The Anker PowerPort Qi I have used in the past is usually 2.5-3.5W, and I have used others that are worse. So it is good relative performance, but a little overstated in absolute terms.

I have a Nexus 7 that supports Qi charging as well. It is a little big for this, but fits on the stand landscape mode. It would not charge with this stand in any tested location. Not a big deal for me, as that wasn’t a planned use, and the Nexus is 7 year old hardware now anyway… But I don’t know why it will work fine on the flat charger at my kid’s desk, and not on this, with or without a case.

The Otterbox cases on both of my phones did not make a noticeable difference in charge speed - tried them both ways, and won’t be taking it off again for a negligible difference.

My biggest dislike - the charger uses a DC barrel, not USB-C. And it isn’t even a standard size barrel - I have many 12V 2A power supplies in the house from routers and hard drives, but this one is the only one that is smaller than that. And the plug itself is a wall wart - too wide and fat to only take up one spot on your power strip. Fine in most outlets depending on what else is there, but not as much on a desk strip full of other things that are similarly awkward.

Overall though, I was very happy with it, and expect to continue to be so for some time to come. It is on my nightstand for overnight charging now that the testing is over. As promised, I created a video of it being used and posted on Youtube - all the content was already covered here, but for any who are interested.

Thanks for choosing me to test!

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Nice detailed review!

Thanks for sharing @jercox

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An excellent review @jercox! The video also was quite good.

Congrats on being selected to test this! Anker clearly made a good choice :wink:

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Awesome review! :clap: great job! :ok_hand:

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Thanks for this awesome review! And thanks for listing the pros and cons out. It’s going to be a great help for our support team to optimize the product in the future.

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Thanks for the kind words everyone!

The video was a stretch, but I think it turned out better than I anticipated. Writing is more of my forte though.

Very good review and video :+1:

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Great review thank you so much for sharing

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