Here are my thoughts on this charger:
On first glance, this two-port charger looks like any old bog-standard bog charger; perhaps with somewhat of a sportier accent. It’s covered in a black carbon-fiber texture, and lights up on the rim when it’s plugged in. Throwing 2.4A with QuickCharge 3.0 (on Port 1) and PowerIQ 2.0 (on Port 2) charging, it’s a speedy, unassuming charger that looks good and does its job well.
What’s extraordinary about this charger is all of the “smart” features it contains. Interestingly enough, this device connects (via Bluetooth LE) to your phone and has a few interesting features that I’ve never seen before from these things. The first, albeit cosmetic feature is that you can use the Spectrum app to change the LED ring’s color (perhaps to match your car’s built-in accent lighting). Roav claims 16,000 shades of RGB are accessible, but I kept mine to a tasteful green to match my car’s lighting. One thing, and only because my keyboard/mouse does it, but I wish there were pulsing or breathing effects accessible as well. The firmware (yes, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but this car charger has firmware) is updateable though so perhaps something like this may come in a future revision.
I didn’t really use the Parking Location feature because Google Maps does that for me, but if your head unit doesn’t trigger the parking location notification on that app, Roav’s implementation seems solid, and just works. As soon as it detects a loss of connection to the charger, the app will geotag your current location and mark it on a map within the app.
Finally, the charger can peek at and report your car’s 12V battery condition. It’s nice to check every now and then and listen to these stats because you could have a dead/dying alternator or battery and don’t know it. If I had something like this that was passively alerting me to my car battery’s condition, I could have saved a few AAA calls through the years.
As far as areas of improvement, nothing comes to mind. It’s prices fairly competitively at a few bucks more than its “non-smart” contempraries, so it’s probably worth getting this one over other similar ones in this manufacturer’s portfolio.
