Credit Where Credit is Due: UGreen’s Chargers and Plugs Rock

This year has been my busiest for travel in some time. As camera and smartphone companies are launching new products all over the world, I’ve found myself on multiple continents living out of a suitcase. Through it all, I’ve found myself with a new appreciation for high-quality plugs and battery banks.

Now, before you come at me screaming “sponsored content,” let me be clear: this story is not sponsored and is my actual opinion. To further dissuade anyone from thinking otherwise, none of the links in this article are affiliate links. This is just one guy writing about stuff he likes with no expectation of a return. I should be allowed to gush a little bit about something that I’ve found legitimately useful, right?

I’ve had extensive, hands-on time with multiple UGreen products simply due to the fact that they are very handy for travel, and while the company doesn’t specifically market some of these things for a traveling photographer, they have been a godsend for one.

If you travel a lot, you’re going to quickly realize how your needs on the road differ from your needs at home. I’ve grown tired of using cheap power banks and power adapters that either don’t work well (like, they charge way too slow) or are straight-up dangerous and have fully converted my travel kit to being gear I can just rely on.

It just so happens UGreen caught my eye with first one solution that, after my great experience, started ballooning into me just starting to collect a whole bunch of useful pieces of kit.

I’ve been slowly amassing UGreen batteries and plugs, starting with the Nexode 20,000 mAh battery pack in January. This is my tried-and-true travel companion and has been with me to Japan, Czechia, and Chile, just to name a few. It was especially useful in those latter two locations because I don’t have very many plug adapters for the style of outlet those regions use.

As such, I’ve been treating this little battery pack not just as a way to get more charge into a camera or my iPhone while wandering city streets, but also as a hub when in my hotel room or Airbnb. I can run one cable into the back of the battery pack to keep it topped up while it charges my iPhone via the Qi 2 wireless charging pad on top, and my Apple Watch and iPad charge through the two USB ports on the front. When I wake up in the morning, everything — including the battery pack — is fully charged and ready to go.

In March for NAB, I decided to pick up another little UGreen charger called the Uno. UGreen makes two versions of this little wall plug, but I opted to go with the smaller, 65W option. This little power brick is exactly what it advertises on the box: a playful charger with a robot face that reacts to charging. The little “shoes” it wears are magnetic, so you can store them when you’re using the charger, and when removed, reveal the two prongs that plug into the wall.

It’s a simple three-port, 65W charger that supports fast charging (to compatible devices) and can handle three at once. Like the Nexode charging station I reviewed recently, it intelligently moves power among those three ports as needed. I will use this plug on an airplane to keep my Nintendo Switch and iPhone topped up, as well as in hotel rooms to charge everything from my Osmo Pocket to my wireless microphones. Plus, the little face on the LED screen is just the cutest thing, and it’s also useful, as different expressions mean different things.

By this point, I was hooked. I started looking into other UGreen cables, chargers, and batteries that I might find useful. I’ve recently picked up the 45W 3-in-1 charger with a retractable USB-C cable (which is nice and even if that cable breaks, it doesn’t render the charger totally worthless since it also has two USB ports), a retractable 100W cable that sits nicely in my tech bag, and another 20,000 mAh battery bank that also has a retractable USB-C cable that I use on day trips because that built-in cable is handy to have around for my iPhone or Fujifilm X100VI, and it allows me to keep that Nexode bank in my hotel room to keep acting as a hub while I’m out.

I’m not here to tell you that UGreen is a must-have if you’re on the road a lot, I just wanted to take a second to just point out how high-quality all of these products are and just how darned useful they have been to me.

Standalone reviews on accessories don’t move the needle much, and we at PetaPixel had to pull back on those because of it, but I felt like UGreen deserved a shout-out nonetheless. The company’s products might be a bit more expensive than the ones most people would be drawn to when browsing through Amazon, but you get what you pay for. They’re built well, work great, and have nice little design touches that make me feel things I never thought I’d feel for something typically considered only utilitarian.