Gadget Guru’s magic box
An unusual thing has happened: the lady from Aukey gave Guru some bargain products to review. This is rare, owing to Guru’s prevailing reputation as a fool, but he’s happy to switch out the usual moaning about cats for some genuine product criticism.
First up, the 8000mAh Wireless Charging Power Bank, a slim black slab with Quick Charge 3.0 USB output, which somehow also features a Qi charger stuffed into its guts. A fundamentally great idea, although the capacity isn’t quite large enough to justify the bag space.
The Aukey 20,000mAh Universal Power Bank is certainly more like it in terms of capacity, and it spits out 3A even if it doesn’t have quick charging. It’s big, thin-ish and heavy enough to bat a seagull out of the sky.
You can charge it via USB-C, micro-USB or even Lightning. Pointless? Yes. Cool? Yes!
The Aukey PR also loaned Guru not one but three wall chargers: the 4-Port USB Wall Charger, which includes one Quick Charge 3.0 port, three automatic balancers and does the job with no fuss; the USB-C Wall Charger, a compact 27W monster that can spew up to 3A down a (not included) USB-C cable and get typically warm while doing so; and the 60W 6-port Desktop Charging Station, which powers itself via the same figure-eight cable Guru plugged into his boombox back in the day. All of these are, frankly, fine, and costeffective, though perhaps not as effective as using, say, your phone’s specific charger.
How do I best extend my PS4 Pro storage?
‘Best’. That’s the word of the day here. Guru could point you at any number of external hard drives, each packed with terabytes upon terabytes of space – just get a WD My Passport 4TB, if capacity is all you care about – but that’s not the best way to do it. Spinny mechanical drives are, frankly, dropping heavily into past-tech territory, particularly with prices of SSDs trickling down.
Perhaps Samsung’s 2TB T5 is a bit expensive for your tastes given that it basically costs the same as the console itself. But that thing is fast, and drive performance is such a huge factor in overall system speed that you’d be a fool to pick anything other than an SSD; it certainly looks as if the next generation of consoles will actively require them. Consider also replacing the internal hard drive, if you’re up for a challenge: the standard storage is a slow spinner, and dropping in an SSD will lower load times by a third.