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Kensington Notebook Charger

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PCQ Bureau
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The Kensington notebook power adapter is a handy utility for those who own a notebook and travel a fair bit. The reason you should look out for this wrongly named charger is because it is not just a notebook charger. It comes with eight adapters points, which plug into pretty much any kind of notebook socket you have. We tried it on a Compaq Presario, an Acer and the IBM ThinkPad series. The charger worked beautifully on all of them, automatically detecting and setting the required voltages. The small gripe we have is that even though the charger unit is slimmer than most chargers we have seen, it is wider and the wire is not retractable.

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The manufacturer claims that the charger even charges cellphones, DVD Players, PDAs and iPods. However, it doesn't ship with any connectors for these devices out of the box. You've to get the connectors separately from the vendor. Kensington has also bundled in a cigarette lighter adapter to ensure that you are able to charge your notebook even when you are on the move. You can remove the back of the adapter to free up an input socket, which you can then connect to the charging system called 'Empower', available in most airplanes today. If you can find a DC input that matches the pin specifications of this device, then it will charge your devices using that DC source. A word of caution is that the charger doesn't charge multiple devices simultaneously and, since we leave devices to be charged overnight, we might not get a sound sleep if we use only this charger. 

One advantage of the device is that if you purchase it and realise that none of the supplied tips fit into your notebook, Kensington will send you the appropriate tip free of charge. This is brilliant customer service and we wonder why Kensington has written this more as a fine print than a selling point, which it is.

The Rs 10k price tag, however, is a major deterrent because that makes it an

expensive replacement for your chargers, since others will cost you around Rs 5K and the charger for your phone will cost you only around Rs 2-3k tops, which means that even if you buy them both, it will be cheaper than buying this one.

Bottom Line: All in all, the device does a great job of providing an integrated solution to your charging needs, but is too expensive to act as a realistic substitute.

Varun Dubey

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