USB cables. It’s fair to say that we’ve gone through quite a few of these during our years writing about smartphones. Indeed, just last week one caught fire here at Coolsmartphone Towers so it’s definitely worth getting a good quality one.
Head to the Volutz website and they say, “Volutz – probably the best USB Cables in the world”. I like that. Ballsey.
Here we’ve got some Apple Lightning cables (which are available on Amazon too at around £9.98), plus a box of the Equilibrium Series USB-C cables. The latter packs 5 colour-coded cables, so two 1 metre cables, one 0.3 metre, a 2 metre cable and a nice 3 metre one too. These are available here on Amazon for £17.48.
The USB-C “boxed special” (as I’ll call it from now on for no good reason) is well worth it too. The short one 30cm cable is great for charging from a portable charger, the one metre one is ideal for boosting from your laptop whilst working, and the other others are brilliant when your phone charger is somewhere under your bed or in a wall-plug and you need that extra length.
Cable-makers are always full of enthusiasm for their product. Here the people are Volutz are no different, and you’ll hear a lot about charge and sync rates, disengaged layered housings, haptic material and a “Dual Housing” construction.
It is, at times, a little confusing for the average customer.
So here’s what you need to know. These USB Volutz cables are used on the International Space Station. I mean, they actually flew the things up there because no other cable maker could deliver such a low voltage drop. Volutz also hate the “wear and tear mentality” – they tell me that the life expectancy of USB cables is just far too short. It shouldn’t be that way, so their cables are built to last.
To start, the DualHousing connector design they’ve created means there’s less tension from the cable to the connector housing. It reduces the chance of your cable fraying The connector housing is reinforced, and works to spread out any stress put on the cable as a whole. It’s a dual disengaged layered housing isolating bending movement and protecting the otherwise fragile connector, because that’s the place where cables usually fail.
The Volutz cables support Qualcomm Quick Charge 2.0 / 3.0 and other high-speed USB chargers. All this, whilst being lightweight and strong. The quad-woven textile fabric braiding stops the cables becoming tangles and they have a rugged and reliable feel to them which is really reassuring.
When you’re plugging in and out, the rubberised and ridged grips give a solid feel. You can also be reassured by some of the testing Volutz do – cables are bent by 120 degrees over 50,000 times so that – if you accidentally roll over them with your chair or pull them out a little hastily, you’re fine.
The cables have gold-plated certified connectors and the Lightning cables we tested didn’t show any of those infamous Apple “this accessory is not certified and may not work reliably with this iPhone” messages, which is a good thing.
Personally, if you’re looking for some extremely high-quality, extremely well-designed and some thoroughly tested and high-performance cables – get these. Head to the Volutz Amazon store or to the Volutz website right now.
Top class.