This nifty charger has a feature I'm not sure it needs – but some great specs regardless
Anker put a screen on its Nano charger
Does your charger need a screen? It's a question that Anker clearly has one answer for, and while I'm not sure I agree with its blanket approach, I'll concede that in many cases it works beautifully. In the last year I've tried a fair few of its newest power banks, and the displays they now often pack really do add value, giving you more precise information about their levels of charge, and proving their connections are safe.
Now, though, Anker has a new version of its Nano charger, the smallest of its wall chargers, and it adds a smart display right there on the plug. I've used it for the past couple of weeks, and I can't pretend that it's won me over on the concept all that well, for all that it's a neat little trick.
The new Nano Smart Display Charger is a 45W charger with Anker's IQ system on board to ensure that your devices get the right power supply, rather than just blasting them with the maximum every time. That's a great feature, but the story here is really the new display that Anker's added on the rounded outside of the charger.
It plays animations when you connect a device, and if you have a relatively recent iPhone, it'll even identify the exact model, to show that it's using the right charging protocol. This is neat, and the animations are cute – but in truth, this is just proving that it's doing what a screenless version would already claim, and I didn't find myself glancing at it very often.
While I could get good charging information from the plug, after all, I could generally get the most important intel (how much charge I've got) from my phone or device's screen, and I would do so more easily and conveniently.
Of course, that doesn't change the fact that this is a great charger, and the 45W limit is appreciably faster than the 30W you might previously have settled for on older Nano chargers. It's a slight shame that in the UK our plugs mean that the slimness of the Nano is compromised a little (with no folding pins like in the US, for instance), but I'll take that tradeoff for proper electrical safety, and no mistake.
My firmest gripe with this new Nano charger, though, comes in the design and layout department. To accommodate that new screen, one major design change has been made, and I don't like it at all. The single USB-C port that this charger offers is now on the bottom of the plug.
Previous Nano chargers have the USB-C port on the outside, right where the screen now sits, and I'd say it's miles better in that older configuration – you can compare the two in my photos above. This new layout makes it more fiddly to plug cables in and out, and makes it far more likely that the charger won't work in certain tight sockets (like those with an obstruction close beneath them).
I didn't really realise that the new display would mean changing the layout fundamentally, and I wonder if Anker went through the same process of realisation. I'll be curious to see how widely it rolls out the displays, too, because this all makes it feel more like a gimmick than in the case of its portable power banks.
Again, outside of that design change, there's really no major downside to the Anker Nano 45W Smart Display Charger. Right now it's got a £10 early Black Friday discount down to £24.99 here in the UK, and for that price it brings fairly unrivalled features. Just be sure that the socket you have in mind for it won't be an issue if the cable has to come from underneath.
