Gadgetory

what's going on guys Kyle here so I recently caught wind of a Kickstarter campaign for the anchor cable which is advertised as being the last charging cable you will ever need and the campaign was a huge hit I mean they raised over 250,000 US dollars by over 4,500 backers but as we all know just because a crowdfunding campaign is successful doesn't necessarily mean that the product is any good so when the company reached out to me recently and asked if I would check out a review sample I said what the heck let's go ahead and put their bold claims to the test and see if this product actually delivers the inner max Sabre a full tower chassis features premium RGB sync lighting included RGB strips and three pre-installed twister bearing RGB fans enjoy a tempered glass window power supply shroud and extensive water cooling support with two included front panel options for prioritizing silence or airflow compromise nothing with the enter max a beret you can learn more by clicking the link below now I'm not exactly sure what the early bird special was for this cable when the campaign was still alive but it looks like it's currently going for around 32 US dollars which is really steep for a charging cable in my opinion especially because the one that I've been using for the last year I got for about eight dollars on Amazon and it's still one of the best cables I've ever encountered so this thing has a lot of explaining to do the cable measures four feet long which I think for most people four feet is a perfect length for a charging cable like this so it's not too long not too short definitely gets the goldilocks award in that arena there's also this nice steel casing that runs the entire span of the cable for a couple reasons one is protection obviously this is a copper wire at its core and there's a rubber casing around that and then a steel casing on the very outside so you kind of get this exoskeleton that provides additional protection the other benefit of a steel casing is that it makes the cable virtually tangle free and I've tested this myself by tying it up in a giant knot and no matter what I do it pulls apart very easily in a matter of seconds because there's simply not much friction going on here like you'd find with a rubber or even a braided cable now I don't think the steel exoskeleton has much to do with this but the cable is advertised as being incredibly durable and there was actually a test on the Kickstarter page that shows a machine bending the cable in the same spot over and over until the cable fails and they found that it was actually able to bend over 60,000 times whereas competing cables that they tested it against only lasted about a quarter of that now obviously I have no way of validating this on my own but it is a fairly compelling demo if it's true it's also instilling enough confidence in the company to offer a lifetime warranty with this product as far as the interface on this thing goes we have a simple USB type a connector on one end and a neodymium magnet on the other and this package actually came included with three magnetic tips which also have gold contacts on them one for a USB type-c another for lightning and micro USB so I guess the idea here is that you can interchange these tips as you see fit which maybe explains why they're advertising this to be the last cable you'll ever need because it has these various connectors now while I understand the concept here and I appreciate the flexibility it offers there's a part of me that also thinks this is kind of silly because the more I use these types of cables the more I find myself just kind of popping on the one connector that I really need and sort of forgetting about the other two these kind of just go in as in a drawer somewhere and you know god forbid that get lost or something negating the whole point of this sort of flexible design now what I see a lot of people doing with these removable magnetic tips is they'll actually leave the tip inside of their phone so that when it's time to charge they just have to hold the cable near and it'll automatically snap and they don't have to actually shove anything into their phones very easy but the problem with that is that these are magnets right so they have to be facing the correct way otherwise they will repel and will not connect and what that essentially does is it removes one of the greatest features of connectors like type-c and lightning which is that they're reversible so this all of a sudden becomes a keyed connector that I'm not too hot about so if I were using this exact cable I would probably just leave the tip connected to the cable itself at all times the other thing we should take a look at are the magnets themselves which are advertised as being incredibly strong there's even gifts on the on the Kickstarter page of people like wasting or carrying large kitchen knives with a single cable just to show how powerful they are but it's all a lie because these are some of the weakest magnets I've ever encountered especially for a product that relies heavily on good magnetism I mean the thing can't even hold its own weight like without anything plugged in if I just drop the cable like this holding the phone at a 45 degree angle immediately causes the cable to come undone even though it's still hanging on there by a thread there's no charging happening at this point and it's been a very frustrating experience for me so far trying to get this thing to stick especially in the car where I use Android auto all the time to basically project my phone's navigation and music onto the screen in my car all is fine and dandy when it's you know sitting on the car mount but as soon as I remove my phone from that car mount for whatever reason and go to look at it the cable disconnects and immediately my music and navigation are killed and it takes me literally like thirty Seconds to a minute to get it all back up so it's it's been incredibly annoying and honestly it's kind of a deal breaker for the product and in fact it's definitely a deal breaker for this product it had a lot of good things going for it but the magnets at the end of the day are just so nice Lee I've even found the cable disconnecting when simply putting the phone down on a desk you really have to like look and make sure that it's actually connected in that the gold contacts are making contact which is just a huge pain in the ass my solution to this problem would be to ditch the magnets altogether and perhaps opt for threaded tips that you can simply screw onto the cable that way you get a rock-solid connection that's not going to disconnect every five seconds to make you want to pull your hair out but still also take advantage of the interchangeability of the various tips so I don't know until they fix this problem I honestly cannot say I'd recommend this product especially for a steep 30-plus dollar price tag on the bright side it does support 2.4 amp charging so at least there's one feature that works as advertised and that's it guys thank you very much for watching this short little review of the anchor cable if you guys have any opinions thoughts concerns let me know in the comments below curious to hear what you guys have to say about it also toss me a look on the video if you enjoyed it and get subscribed for more tech stuff coming at you really soon and follow me on flip lane if you wanna watch my videos a week early without ads for 3 bucks a month I'll put a link for that in the video description until next time guys thank you so much for tuning in have yourselves Goodwin and I'll see y'all in the next video hey at least it makes a ugly necklace you know that's a feature