Anker 40W 5-Port Family USB Charger review

With some many portable devices, being able to charge them all quickly and efficiently is more important that ever.  With the Anker 40W 5-Port Family USB Charger you’ve got the flexibility and power to deal with a house full of kit.

This tiny box, which is smaller than a deck of cards, plugs into a wall socket via a figure-of-eight cable and gives you five USB ports to charge all of your devices with. That’s plenty for even the busiest of households and lets you leave all of the most important cables plugged in and ready for use.

It’s hard to describe any device of this type as attractive, but the 5-Port Family USB Charger is as close as you’ll get. Neat curved edges and the soft-touch plastic give it a neat look and a robust feel. We’re pleased to say that there are no status lights of any kind, so you can use it in a bedroom without illuminating everything.

This charger has Anker’s PowerIQ technology inside, which is a fancy way of saying that it adjusts the power to each port, based on demand. Each USB port, therefore, is capable of delivering up to 2.4A of power, which is enough to charge a tablet, such as the iPad Air, quickly, or speedily top-up a less demanding device, such as a phone. Of course, each port will only deliver the required power, so you won’t explode a 1A device by plugging it into the charger.

With a maximum output of 8A, using all of the ports at once would give you only 1.6A of power to each device. That should still be enough to charge a tablet, but at a slower pace.

Given the relative lack of high-power devices and the likelihood of having them all plugged in at once, the Anker 40W 5-Port Family USB Charger is a flexible, powerful and well-priced charger, and it wins a Best Buy award.