Tech Talk

The best wireless chargers are a bit of a dream, breaking you out of the old rut of having to plug in your phone every time to sit down to work or sleep. Ditch your cables and quit wearing out your phone's charging port by getting yourself a handy wireless charger. It's easier than ever now that more wireless chargers are switching to USB-C so you can stick to one cable.

The best wireless chargers for Android, iPhone, and beyond

For a flat pad, Belkin has made a comeback in the wireless charging space over the last year with a variety of 10W and 15W wireless chargers that are Made for Google. They support the EPP charging profile that the Google Pixel 5 uses while still having the wireless charging profiles that Samsung and Apple employ for their phones. The Belkin Boost Charge 15W Wireless Charging Pad is slim, non-slip, and skips the Qualcomm QuickCharge/Power Delivery quagmire by using an old-school barrel-plug AC adapter instead, which means that while you can't swap the wall plug for it, at least you know you won't get slow speeds because you accidentally plugged into a slower wall charger instead.

For when you want to go vertical, I actually recommend going with a unique multi-port charger: the Unravel 3+1. It can fold up into a stand when you need to charge a phone while you're using it, but when you don't, it either folds out into three separate 10W charging pads. You can fold it accordion-style for one compact charging pad on a nightstand or a crowded desk. There's also the Spigen SteadiBoost Flex for use as either a flat pad or a stand when you need it.

Standards, standards, and more standards: What makes a good Qi charger so hard to find

Wireless chargers have been around for quite a while, but they've really gained steam in the last three years since Apple finally added Qi charging to the iPhone 8 and up. However, just as we once had to make sure a fast wired charger adhered to the particular standard our phone once used, wireless chargers have a half-dozen different charging standards and protocols that are hard to condense down to a product name or bullet-note in a feature listing. So let's start with the most important standards on a Qi charger, the actual charging specs:

• 15W EPP: This is the Qi Wireless Consortium's "Extended Power Profile," and it's a relatively open standard, though the list of phones using it right now is relatively small, including LG phones, the Google Pixel 5, and the OnePlus 8 Pro (when not using OnePlus's own charger for proprietary 30W wireless charging).
• 15W Samsung: This is technically Samsung Fast Charge Wireless 2.0, and we've yet to find any chargers outside Samsung's own 15W Wireless Charger Stand. You can only charge the Note 10 Series and the S20 Series at 15W right now, and even then, actual charging speed is more like 12W.
• 10W Qi: Of the 10W charging specs, the standard 10W is what most chargers and Android support. This can sometimes be using the EPP profile, sometimes it's not, and sometimes it's not the standard Qi because it's actually the Samsung profile instead.
• 10W Samsung: This is technically Samsung Fast Charge 1.0, and for a lot of wireless chargers, this is the 10W standard they mean when they say they're a 10W charger. The charging speed you'll see on a compatible Samsung device is closer to 9W that 10W.
• 7.5W Apple: 7.5W is the charging speed used for iPhones, and as such, it's become a charging speed offered on almost all wireless chargers.
• 5W Qi: This is the basic Qi profile that all Qi chargers should support. Even if you can't fast-charge your particular phone on a particular charger, you should always be able to get 5W charging if your device supports Qi charging.

Since we've yet to find a wireless charger that supports all of these, we instead have to try and pick a charger that has the particular standards that we think our devices now and in the future can use. If you're a Galaxy user or iPhone user, your task is easy since most chargers have your protocols. The rest of us should be seeking out a charger with 15W EPP or 10W standard Qi charging.

Of course, there's the way a Qi charger is powered: most Qi chargers worth buying don't have a permanently attached AC wall adapter. Two outdated standards are still rampant in the Qi charging market — Micro-USB input ports and Qualcomm QuickCharge 2.0/3.0 fast charging — but more USB-C based chargers are becoming available that are compatible with Power Delivery charging. I've tried to highlight such chargers whenever possible because having a Qi charger you can use with your Chromebook or MacBook charger is very handy, especially if you're trying to pair down on the number of chargers you need to bring along when traveling.

So, since there's a lot of standards at play here, here's which standards and speeds each these chargers support in handy chart form:

The iOttie Easy One Touch Wireless 2 gets a pass on being micro-USB because it comes with the car charger to power it — and that car charger has a spare USB-C port for charging a second device — but otherwise, I highly recommend avoiding wireless chargers that use micro-USB. Why? Because it's an indicator that the model is either an older design — and only gives older speeds — or that the company who made it was cutting corners, and neither is good.