TL;DR: The new Belkin 3-in-1 charging dock has sporadic power dropouts which kills optimized charging on the iPhone.
So I got the new Belkin 3-in-1 charging dock for my nightstand in February. I was searching for something that looked nice and supported MagSafe for my iPhone 13 Pro and featured at least an Apple Watch charger additionally. I was looking to replace my old cheapo Anker wireless charger that had so far worked just fine, but was too large for my iPhone 13 Pro, making it not lay flat because of the camera bump.
The Belkin is hella expensive but I thought it’d be worth its price. And at first glance it was, it charged my iPhone and Apple Watch over night. I smelled trouble when I randomly looked at my battery settings one day:
I saw that the charger seems to intermittently stop charging and then immediately start again (look at the lower bar being split at around 6 am twice). I also noticed that the optimized charging feature wasn’t active. I initially put it off as a one-off hiccup or that we may have had a power outage or whatever, but this issue came up every night to varying degrees. Sometimes it would stop charging only once or not at all, but most often it would be 3 times or more, and at completely different times. Another example:
I assumed it was a faulty unit or power adapter so I contacted Belkin, explained my issue with it and had them repair/exchange it. That took forever and only after me asking about it they sent it back, without explaining what they did (repair, exchange, nothing). It seemed brand new. So I started using the unit they sent back, the first day it was good, the second day:
I had started using my old $15 Anker unit again ever since I had sent the faulty 3-in-1 back to Belkin. The Anker worked perfectly, the wobbling notwithstanding. The bad thing about this is that this issue breaks optimized charging on the iPhone and also the Apple Watch (the power drops also affect the watch according to its own battery settings), because the phone thinks I’m disconnecting it before it’s fully charged up.
So in the end I got an original Apple MagSafe charger and power brick and use that with the Spigen MagFit Duo dock. With those it now works perfectly:
Could be that I got two faulty Belkin units in a row, but for that price, I expect better quality control. Guess I’m back to only Apple original accessories. Maybe some of you could chime in if you have this problem (or if you don’t), I’d be interested.
So I got the new Belkin 3-in-1 charging dock for my nightstand in February. I was searching for something that looked nice and supported MagSafe for my iPhone 13 Pro and featured at least an Apple Watch charger additionally. I was looking to replace my old cheapo Anker wireless charger that had so far worked just fine, but was too large for my iPhone 13 Pro, making it not lay flat because of the camera bump.
The Belkin is hella expensive but I thought it’d be worth its price. And at first glance it was, it charged my iPhone and Apple Watch over night. I smelled trouble when I randomly looked at my battery settings one day:
I saw that the charger seems to intermittently stop charging and then immediately start again (look at the lower bar being split at around 6 am twice). I also noticed that the optimized charging feature wasn’t active. I initially put it off as a one-off hiccup or that we may have had a power outage or whatever, but this issue came up every night to varying degrees. Sometimes it would stop charging only once or not at all, but most often it would be 3 times or more, and at completely different times. Another example:
I assumed it was a faulty unit or power adapter so I contacted Belkin, explained my issue with it and had them repair/exchange it. That took forever and only after me asking about it they sent it back, without explaining what they did (repair, exchange, nothing). It seemed brand new. So I started using the unit they sent back, the first day it was good, the second day:
I had started using my old $15 Anker unit again ever since I had sent the faulty 3-in-1 back to Belkin. The Anker worked perfectly, the wobbling notwithstanding. The bad thing about this is that this issue breaks optimized charging on the iPhone and also the Apple Watch (the power drops also affect the watch according to its own battery settings), because the phone thinks I’m disconnecting it before it’s fully charged up.
So in the end I got an original Apple MagSafe charger and power brick and use that with the Spigen MagFit Duo dock. With those it now works perfectly:
Could be that I got two faulty Belkin units in a row, but for that price, I expect better quality control. Guess I’m back to only Apple original accessories. Maybe some of you could chime in if you have this problem (or if you don’t), I’d be interested.
