If you’re a bit of a gadget freak or you have a household with more than one ecosystem, you probably have your fair share of cables made for different things, and that could make Belkin’s latest cable an ideal replacement.
With all the gadgets in our lives, it can be hard to keep up with the amount of ports required to plug in and keep them charged. There are just so many out there, and while everything is gradually moving to a universal standard, we’re just not there yet.
Currently, USB Type C is that standard, and while you can find it on Apple’s MacBook Pro and many an Android phone, it’s also not on Apple’s iPhone or iPad, nor is it on every Android phone, let alone on many Windows PCs. Across these, you might find microUSB or some other proprietary port, and in the Apple garden, you’re likely to find Lightning on Apple’s mobile devices.
That likely means you have more ports than you really want to think about, and it’s something Belkin is looking to change.
This week, it has announced something designed to bring some of these ports together under one roof: one plug to rule them all.
Or most of them, anyway. At the very least, Belkin’s Universal Cable will bring together the popular plugs, supporting microUSB, Lightning, and USB Type C under the same plug.
And it does this with a cute little design: the main plug is actually a microUSB plug, yet clipped to the end of that cord are connectors that transform the cord into either an Apple Lightning charger for an iPhone or a USB Type C charger for something a Note 9 or a Pixel (or anything else that uses Type C).
Essentially, it’s three plugs in one, and it’s designed to be the one cord you carry around, rather than the three you might be doing it with now. That potentially means you can slim down your luggage and bring the one cable instead of the several you probably normally rock up with.
It’s not the first time we’ve seen this, mind you, and it likely won’t be the last, but if you feel like you need a bit of slimming down to the one cable, you’ll find Belkin’s Universal Cable in stores for $39.95.