Thinium Charge review
The Thinium Charge is an ultra-compact charger that can deliver up to one amp via wall connection, and whatever your USB source is willing to supply if you want to go that direction. The Charge comes in either Lightning Adapter (Apple) or micro USB (Android) flavors.
The idea behind this product is that all prongs, wires, and plugs fold into a streamlined device, so it’s easy to carry it anywhere in your pocket and you should be able to charge anywhere there’s some sort of power source.
The idea is also that you can see your phone while it’s charging on the wall, and a wall outlet serves as a nice place to have a charger and have a charging dock. The way the product is designed you should be able to plug something in in the outlet underneath without any complications. The potential ability to reduce clutter is pretty neat even if you’re not interested in using it as a portable charger.
You can pull the dock off the wall, fold away the prongs, pop the charging base back into it, and what’s left is something that resembles a small and very thick credit card. Easy to slip into a pocket.
I didn’t have a chance to test the pass-through sync ability, but there is a potential that might work when plugged into a computer.
One serious consideration is that a phone the size of the HTC One M8 (5.76 inches) is about the maximum height one can reach before you’re pushing into the wall due to the plug that doesn’t extend to 90 degrees. Anything larger than an M8 and you might be pushing the charger out of the wall.
The other serious concern is the orientation of the micro USB plug. I’ve been in the HTC world for a while now, so I held the belief that plug orientation was probably a standard. Evidently it’s not. I learn something new every day. Any HTC device I have with this plug orientation faces the wall. You can sort of see in the first picture below (I wasn’t packing two cameras with me today and had to use a mirror).
The devices the Thinium Charge lists it works with are Samsung, Nokia, Motorola, and LG. Although anything where the small side of a micro USB plug is near the screen and the wide side is near the back should work.
Another concern is thicker cases are going to cause the phone to be too far away from the base to plug in. I’m guessing this is a concern with the Lightning Adapter folks as well. from the back plate to the place where the middle of the plug would be appears to be less than a centimeter. Thick cases aren’t going to fly with this thing.
Overall it’s a neat concept. I wish they sold it with a reversible micro USB plug for those of us that face the other way, but for those with supported phones, it’s a pretty neat gadget. It can very easily tame your charger, cable, phone charging mess into one little device that hangs off the wall.
The Thinium Charge ultra thin docking wall charger is currently only available from the manufacturer’s website (in black, white, and gold, micro USB or Lightning,) although with releases like this I’d expect it to be elsewhere shortly. You won’t need to make room in your pocket because at nearly $50 gone from there there’ll be plenty of space to spare. I’d expect that price to drop shortly.
Overall I think it’s a good concept, great execution for Apple and a huge chunk of Android users, but the price has to come down as I think people would rather carry a bulky $3 charger with them than part with $50 for an admittedly very cool product.
