I travel with my notebook, probably not as much as many people do, but enough. One of the heaviest things in my notebook bag is the notebook charger. For whatever reason over the years, the design of notebook chargers has not improved at all.
I have been using a Targus travel charger for a while now, which fulfills a couple of my specific wish-list criteria concerning chargers, but not all:
- The transformer unit should be small and lightweight.
- All cables should be able to fully disengage from the transformer.
- The charging tips should be interchangeable/exchangeable for future compatibility.
- The unit should be able to power more than one device at once, preferably the the notebook and some USB device (like a phone)
- The unit should be outlet neutral, both consuming an outlet and providing a pass-through outlet so that there is a zero sum of consumed outlets
- The plug on the unit should be able to fit in tight spots without the transformer blocking other outlets.
- The wires on the unit should be long enough to provide reach, but not so long as to add 10 pounds of conductive copper to my bag.
- The wires and charging tips should come with some useful cable/component management, so that they can be easily organized and stowed.
- Surge suppression would be nice
- Very, very short UPS (like, enough only to pull out the plug and plug it into another outlet) or internal battery power enough for a USB device or two (ala the Zagg Sparq I already carry) would be nice.
A recent change to my equipment list has at least temporarily rendered my Targus charger obsolete, since they don’t offer a charging tip that will fit my device. As a result, I’ve been looking for a travel charger that might better fit my criteria. Sadly, I’ve not been able to find anything that fits all of my criteria. I’ve looked at ioGear’s Anywhere Charger, but it doesn’t have the right tips, not to mention that you can’t disengage all of the cables from the transformer (this lack-of-feature drives me crazy).
There are any number of off-brand chargers that will charge one device at a time, but the only thing I can imagine is worse than having to carry a bazillion charging cables because the devices all use different plugs, is to have to carry a bazillion transformers for the same reason.
Ideally, Targus should just make the charging tip that I need, then I can just pay for that tip and move on. But it looks like the odd power requirements of my device aren’t handled by their transformer, or the device is too new to have a supported tip yet.
