Anker MagGo Wireless Charging Station (Foldable 3-in-1) review: High-speed foldable travel charger is perfect for traveling light | iMoreIMore

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Anker MagGo Wireless Charging Station (Foldable 3-in-1) review: High-speed foldable travel charger is perfect for traveling light

Anker’s Qi2-equipped MagGo Wireless Charging Station (Foldable 3-in-1) is a great compact charger for your most-mobile Apple devices. It gets a bit cramped when an iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPods are attached, but its speedy 15W charging speeds and compact size when folded make it a great option when traveling.

Clever folding design

Fast Qi2 charging

Charges iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods all at once

A bit cramped

Apple Watch magnetic connection weak

Not great for Apple Watch Nightstand Mode

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Accessory super-brand Anker is fully embracing the new Qi2 charging standard with its power adapter range this year. Qi2 (an open wireless charging standard which can offer faster charging speeds than standard MagSafe chargers can manage) is included right across its new devices, and it makes them very attractive indeed.

Today we're looking at the company’s new Anker MagGo Wireless Charging Station (Foldable 3-in-1), to give it its full, slightly awkward name, after coming away thoroughly impressed by its similarly-Qi2-equipped Anker MagGo Power Bank (10K).

With room for an Apple Watch, AirPods, and iPhone, this foldaway charger is great for travelers, with 15W Qi2 charging giving it an edge over much of the competition. With support for iPhone and AirPods, too, it’s easily one of the best portable travel Apple Watch chargers on the market — maybe even the very best.

Price and Availability

You can buy the Anker MagGo Wireless Charging Station (Foldable 3-in-1) now, priced at $109.99 / £99.99. It’s available in both black and white shades. It’s a good price for the device — a little premium over other 3-way chargers, but justified thanks to Qi2 charging speeds and its smart folding design. It also comes with a wall charger and USB-C cable — not always a given these days, and worth a few bucks in its own right.

What I like

The headline feature of the Anker MagGo Wireless Charging Station (Foldable 3-in-1) is its Qi2 compatibility. It’s an open wireless charging standard that also supports Apple’s MagSafe magnetic connections — but at a speedy 15W rate, quicker than the 7.5W max that similar wireless chargers can manage. For all the mathematicians out there, that’s going to lead to charging rates twice as fast as 7.5W chargers. Anker quotes bringing a depleted iPhone 15 Pro back to 20% charge in just 15 minutes with this new charger, and that played out in our testing, too.

It’s a similarly rosy picture for the Apple Watch charging component, with the onboard puck taking advantage of Apple’s own officially certified charging tech to offer fast-charging for the smartwatch as well. You’ll get about 50% of the Apple Watch Series 9 battery refilled in just over 30 minutes with the charger at 5W. It’s a 5W output for AirPods too.

It’s a really clever design, especially for regular travelers who need to keep their on-the-go tech as compact as possible. Folding down into a small cuboid shape (89 × 60 × 25 mm when folded) and weighing just 195.6g, it’s a bit like a transformer toy. The front half of the cube folds out to give you an upright charging station for your phone (with a magnet strong enough to hold the handset in landscape orientation for use with the StandBy Mode display setting). This reveals an inner charging pad to place your AirPods, while folding out from underneath the unit is the Apple Watch charging cradle. It’s incredibly neat.

Anker makes sure it’s charging safely too. An onboard chip monitors temperatures 3 million times per day, and adjusts the power supply to your devices should anything appear to be overheating.

And while I’m all for green efforts to reduce e-waste, it’s nice to see the overall price inclusive of a USB-C cable and wall charger that connects to the station, included in the box. If you need a straightforward USB-C charger for other devices, you’re effectively getting that here too, good for up to 25W charging speeds.

What I don’t Like

For the most part there’s little to fault the Anker MagGo Wireless Charging Station (Foldable 3-in-1), but there are a few annoyances holding it back from full marks.

The first is an inevitable side effect of the compact design — it all feels a bit cramped. Once you have the phone, earphones and watch on and charging, it starts to feel a bit like a game of Buckaroo getting them all to sit on the small charger. It’s especially true for the Apple Watch, with the design here making it fiddly to neatly tuck your watch straps away.

The magnetic connection to the Apple Watch feels a bit weak, too. Unless the foldout charging pad is laid flat, your Apple Watch can slip to a jaunty angle. It doesn’t lose charge unless it fully slips off, but can make it a little tougher to read. The charging pad isn’t great for using the Apple Watch’s Nightstand Mode either as a result — though this may be less of a concern for anyone also charging an iPhone 14 Pro or iPhone 15 Pro with an always-on display for glancing at the time.

Competition

There are quite a few travel chargers with similar folding designs on the market already, but at the time of writing there aren’t any notable names offering that same Qi2 charging speed in the spec list.

If speed isn’t an issue, I’ve previously enjoyed using the Ampere Unravel, which is even more compact and folds out flat. It doesn’t offer MagSafe charging though, just wireless. Expect to pay around $60 for that one.

And while it isn’t strictly intended for travel, the flat nature of the Belkin Boost Charge Pro 3-in-1 Wireless Charging Pad meant I took it away with me all the time, slipping easily into a rucksack. It has MagSafe, but is expensive at around the $140 mark.

Should you buy it?

You should buy this if…

You shouldn’t buy this if…

Verdict

Whether you’re looking for a travelling charging station or even simply one for your bedside table, the Anker MagGo Wireless Charging Station (Foldable 3-in-1) is a great option. Looking after charging for all your portable Apple devices, it folds away to a discreet block that will fit snugly into hand luggage, and open up for speedy wireless charging.

Bottom line

Compact and speedy, this could end up being the only charger you need in your travel bag.

Gerald Lynch is the Editor-in-Chief of iMore, keeping careful watch over the site's editorial output and commercial campaigns, ensuring iMore delivers the in-depth, accurate and timely Apple content its readership deservedly expects. You'll never see him without his iPad Pro, and he loves gaming sessions with his buddies via Apple Arcade on his iPhone 14 Pro, but don't expect him to play with you at home unless your Apple TV is hooked up to a 4K HDR screen and a 7.1 surround system.

Living in London in the UK, Gerald was previously Editor of Gizmodo UK, and Executive Editor of TechRadar, and has covered international trade shows including Apple's WWDC, MWC, CES and IFA. If it has an acronym and an app, he's probably been there, on the front lines reporting on the latest tech innovations. Gerald is also a contributing tech pundit for BBC Radio and has written for various other publications, including T3 magazine, GamesRadar, Space.com, Real Homes, MacFormat, music bible DIY, Tech Digest, TopTenReviews, Mirror.co.uk, Brandish, Kotaku, Shiny Shiny and Lifehacker. Gerald is also the author of 'Get Technology: Upgrade Your Future', published by Aurum Press, and also holds a Guinness world record on Tetris. For real.

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