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There are a lot of wireless Qi chargers on the market now, but most of them compete on price rather than features. Just Mobile gets what's important to users, however, and the new Alubase Wireless is focused on speed and style, offering up a fully QuickCharge 3.0 (QC3.0) compatible fast charge on a beautiful aluminum base. QC3.0 typically offers 30% faster wireless charging than regular Qi chargers, and that's a lot when you want to just grab and go!
Tech expert Dave Taylor of https://www.AskDaveTaylor.com/ got his hands on an early unit and put it through its paces with an Apple iPhone XS, Samsung Galaxy S8 and a Google Pixel 3 XL. With somewhat varying results. Watch, and find out what happened!
Check it out at https://www.JustMobile.com/
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Is this the best wireless charger you can buy? Let's have a look
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Dave Taylor here and I'm looking at wireless Qi chargers again. There are a lot of them on the
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market but there's a lot of different features that don't seem to make it into every single one
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So the latest I'm looking at is this. This is the Alubase wireless from Just Mobile and
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it's pretty darn nice. So it features a unibody aluminum assembly and then the top has this sort
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of rubberized mat and then the very top ring is actually an anti-scratch silicone ring and then
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on the bottom there are little silicone feet. So it sits, it doesn't move, it actually doesn't
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mar your surface, comes with a micro USB cable and depending on what configuration you get
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this is the really nice part, it comes with a Quick Charge 3 wall charger. Now Quick Charge 3
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is the latest generation of Quick Charge and most modern smartphones and in fact most modern
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smart devices actually work great with this chip and it gives you the maximum possible
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fastest possible charge. So power cord, Quick Charge or QC3, plug it in, it's just a single USB
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connection and now we have our charger ready to roll. Now it's a high-speed wireless charger which
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means it runs, it should charge 30% faster than on another device or another wireless charger right
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So in this case let's start with our testing of an Apple iPhone XS. So I'm going to put that on and
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as you can see hopefully, you can see it's charging so that works well and it is giving
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7.5 watts to the iPhone so that's about 50% more power or charge than you would get with a
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regular wireless charger that isn't QC3 because those generally tend to default to 5 watts
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That makes a difference because when you have it sitting on here you don't want to pay a huge
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performance penalty because it's not a wired charger. So iPhone X, now let's look at the
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Samsung Galaxy S8. Now the S8, the S9, the upcoming S10 all will be fed 10 watts. Android, it's given
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10 watts to the phone so I put this on top and it charges. I didn't find that it charged dramatically
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faster so maybe the Android phones tend to do a really good job on the wireless charging anyway
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You can see I had to adjust this one a little bit to get it on the sweet spot and it's still
2:42
thinking about charging. There we go, so now I'm at 12%. It's not a lot of charge but you can see here
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that you get this nice display. In fact, I have to say Android phones do a whole lot better
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job of showing you how charged you are versus the iPhone. Gives you that little green battery but
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then after a couple seconds it just goes away and so then if it's just sitting there you have to
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do something to see how much charge you have left to go. So there's that. Now this is the Google
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Pixel 3 XL and the Pixel 3 is very persnickety, that's the word, it's very actually
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cranky about what charger you use. People actually were afraid that it wouldn't charge at all
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with non-Google wireless charging so fortunately that's not the case but it is interesting that
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when I put it on here, this is a QC3 but of course Quick Charge is not a Google charging technology
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so on the bottom as you can see in this close-up it tells me that it's charging slowly. Really
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You can't work with Quick Charge? Come on Google, you could do better. So this will charge and it
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will charge okay just like the Galaxy will charge but I really wish everything just
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magically worked super fast. That's just kind of what you want, right? You don't want this
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performance penalty. Now here's the thing though is you don't want to have to worry about a wireless
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charger that doesn't understand what you're putting on it and then starts pushing out
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current because you dropped on a paperclip or your car keys. So fortunately the Alubase wireless
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also has this whole retinue, object detection, over current detection, over voltage detection
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short circuit detection and overheat detection. So anytime it's not working exactly how it thinks
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it should be working and it doesn't detect the sort of receiver coil of the wireless charging
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technology then this thing just goes off again and right now it's not pushing out any voltage
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so it's not using any current so this is really just sort of like a passive or dead device
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You put something on it that understands wireless and it makes you know this like physical hardware
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that actually interfaces and boom it all works great. So let's see so the actual physical
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characteristics of it is a really nice unit. I will say that Just Mobile has a very good handle
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on working with aluminum. All their products are really nice, nicely machined, nicely designed
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aluminum products and this is no different. This is a nice wireless unit. It is solid. There's you
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know there are no moving parts. There's nothing to break. There's no switches. It's very very low key
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Now the only thing having said that is let's see it should have a little tiny light I think that
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comes on. Maybe, maybe not. So on the downside there doesn't seem to be any indication on the wireless
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charging that it's actually charging. I could be wrong on that but I don't see anything so that
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might be something that you would care about because a lot of them have like little tiny blue light or something so you see that it is actually active versus passive. I can check out
5:55
let's see on the packaging there's nothing that indicates that there's any sort of feedback
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mechanism so that might be important to you but otherwise there's a lot to like about this and
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in fact having it be packaged with a QC3 charger that's a real win. Now you can buy it without that
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but if you're going to just use a regular wall charger like what came with your phone or something
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then you're kind of missing out on part of what makes this a really interesting device
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So in terms of actual performance let me just tell you that I timed my charge wirelessly with
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the QC3 charger on the iPhone XS and it gave me a 40% charge in an hour so that's not bad
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Again you know someday maybe we will have these things like embedded in tables at restaurants
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and imagine that you're having lunch with all your colleagues or your friends or something
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you put your phone in the right place and then when you're ready to go boom it's all ready to
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go it's fully charged or it's at least significantly more charged than it was before
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That'd be nice. Now you can also plug this directly into your computer and you can just
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tap off of your computer's USB connection so that will work too. That's not a QC3 charger
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so maybe it's not quite as fast but certainly gives you a lot of flexibility. So that's really
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all I have so this is the Alubase Wireless and before I tell you the price let me ask
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if you can go ahead and click subscribe and subscribe to my channel really appreciate it
7:21
it helps us stay in touch and it helps you find out all the cool new devices I get my hands on
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So speaking of devices that I get my hands on this is kind of in a funny space this isn't quite
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released yet from just mobile so the pricing is a little confusing. You can find it without the QC3
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charger on Amazon but I would recommend unless you have a QC3 charger get the package that
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includes the charger which is what this yellow sticker indicates and according to just mobile's
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material that they provided me the Alubase Wireless with QC3 charger is $49.95 at justmobile.com
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Having said that I just went on their site and I can't find it yet so I think I'm a little ahead
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of the curve there but hopefully by the time you see this video you'll be able to pop over to their
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site or pop over to Amazon and actually find this product because I like it. I think it's a really
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nice simple solution for a flat sort of hockey puck style wireless Qi charging and you know
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however fast or slow it charges with different phones then at least it charges and at least it
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works and it doesn't slip and it's a nice simple device. So with that this is Dave Taylor and I
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actually think that it's my Samsung that needs charging the most which means I will catch you
8:42
in my next video
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