UGREEN Uno Series – Chargers with cute faces
I’m loathe to do a roundup review but I’ve got to admit that my reach exceeds my grasp. Sorry UGREEN. If it’s any consolation your Uno series has been great… at least when I can wrestle them away from my kids.
The downside of your chargers looking like toys is that you’ll come back to this…
UGREEN sent me their Uno 100W charger, Uno Magnetic Wireless Power Bank, Uno 100W USB Type-C to USB Type-C cable and Uno 15W Wireless Charger Stand. What unites these series is one, simple, silly flourish- they have faces, feet, ears, headphones and other things to make them look like adorable, tiny, USB-C robots.
Beating the monotony of the USB charger market by adding… faces… to chargers, batteries and cables seems at once both a silly and genius idea. It can, of course, be both depending on how you look at it. On the upside they are, genuinely, adorable to behold and they are just as good as any other UGREEN device I’ve tested. That’s to say, they’ve been reliable and the 100W wall adapter is currently lost down behind a dining chair (poor thing) powering my laptop and portable monitor while I type.
But if I were to nitpick, the 100W wall adapters forward-facing ports are a step back from the downward-facing ones I appreciated so much on UGREEN’s old 65W adapter. It’s not uncommon to tuck wall adaptors down behind furniture. In fact I’ve yet to see a UK house, outside of the kitchen anyway, where sockets are half way up the wall or half way through the forth wall like they are in UGREEN’s promotional photos. This isn’t a dealbreaker of a problem, since hotel rooms, or socket adapters have sockets you normally *want* this kind of charger in, but I’ve already put something of a bend in the 100W Uno cable so I’d hazard it’s at least a consideration. One upside to the wall chargers is that the little feet that make them look like sitting robots are a cover for the prongs. If you manage not to lose these then it’s a welcome addition to keep the hard metal pointy bits from doing anything in your backpack a mischief. Regrettably while disconnected and with the feet attached… it has no face!
Aw, no face!
Oh wait…
As for the portable, magnetic battery, it’s great. Apple’s MagSafe on iPhones is a great fix to the problem of trying to use a phone so much you need to charge it and hole it at the same time. Granted this isn’t conducive to a healthy relationship with social media, but that ship has sailed either way. UGREEN’s Magnetic Wireless Power Bank has a large, adorable face-screen, a fold-out metal kickstand and, of course, MagSafe, but it can also be used with a cable in a pinch. It has become something of a favourite around the household with one of my kids looking after it, tucking it into bed, and apparently knowing more about its hidden facial expressions than I could hope to divine. My only complaint is that it takes a couple of seconds to fire up and display the remaining battery level. Since I’m the Keeper Of The Batteries around the household, and usually the one to charge them up, this bugs me particularly.
Faces on things seems like a good idea until they make you feel guilty for ramming them down behind a chair in a dusty corner…
The 100W C to C cable is… interesting. I’ve never thought “this cable could really do with a screen” and regrettably the screen doesn’t display any useful information about the power or data particulars of any given connection. It’s nonetheless a good cable for surprisingly not a lot of beans. It survived being rammed behind a dining chair and taking an awkward bend in any case.
Overall it’s a great range, and brings a much-needed dash of squee to a very typically overlooked category of essentials. You might find they go walkies with the kids more often than not, but if something as pedestrian as a USB wall charger can bring a little joy and little shouts of “it’s chewing, that means it’s charging!”… who am I to argue!
Hello there
If you somehow read this far and didn’t just go “SQUEEEE A FACE!” and buy one… here’s the 100W wall adaptor, complete with at least two product photos showing incredibly unlikely socket placement. (Note: not an affiliate link!)