It charges a phone as fast as the phone allows and folds flat enough to forget about, and then the single port makes you choose what gets charged tonight.
My old 20W brick lived in the front pocket of my bag with its prongs sticking out, and over about two years it worked a hole through the lining and put a scratch across my laptop lid that I notice every time I open it, so when I packed for four days in Manchester and found the same brick sitting there like a caltrop, I bought the UGREEN Nexode 30W that night for £13.99. Then I read threads about whether 30W is enough for anything until about one in the morning, which is a habit I have and should lose. It turned up two days later in a box containing the charger and a quick start guide, and I folded the pins in and put it in the same ruined pocket, where it sat flat and did nothing to anything.
The wattage was the part I'd been worrying about, and the number I kept running into is that a Pixel 6 caps out somewhere around 23W of input no matter what you hang off it, which I couldn't confirm myself because I don't own a meter. What I could do was time it, so I ran the phone up from 20 percent twice on a Tuesday, once on the Nexode and once on the old 20W brick, and got about half an hour to 60 percent both ways. Chargers past about 18W all move a phone along more or less the same curve, and what the box calls 30W is a ceiling my phone never once climbed to.
“What the box calls 30W is a ceiling my phone never once climbed to.”
I've had this thing charging a phone under a hotel pillow overnight, which I know is not what you're supposed to do, and in the morning it was warm the way a mug is warm an hour after you made the tea, where the old 20W brick used to come out of the wall hot enough that I'd unplug it with two fingers. I never worked out whether that was the brick or the socket it was sitting in.
Nothing in the box but the charger and the guide, which I knew going in and had completely failed to plan for, because I assumed the way everybody assumes that a drawer holding eleven USB-C cables must hold at least one good USB-C cable, and it does not. Two of mine turned out to be charge-only leads off things like a beard trimmer, one had been chewed at the connector by something in this house, and the one I ended up using came off a Switch dock and is about five feet long, which is exactly the wrong length for a hotel nightstand. I spent an evening plugging cables in and watching the phone to see whether it said fast charging, and I came out of that with one labeled cable and a worse opinion of my own storage habits. UGREEN sells a suitable cable for about five pounds, so the honest cost of this charger is nearer twenty than fourteen unless you already own a PD cable and know which one it is.
On any given night in this house there's a phone, a pair of earbuds and a Switch that all want the socket behind the sofa, and because this charger has exactly one USB-C port on it I end up standing there at eleven ranking them by how much I'll regret it in the morning. The laptop question resolves the way everyone says it does, so 30W holds a MacBook Air roughly level while you're working on it and puts very little back, and I stopped trying after a week. There's a two-port version and I looked at it twice and didn't buy it, for reasons I can't seperate from stubbornness.
The claim that sold me on this in the first place is the one I can't check. Somebody in a thread said they'd run an iPhone 15 Pro Max off one of these daily since September and watched the battery health sit at 100 percent until it slipped to 99 last week, and battery health moves for about nine reasons with the wall adapter maybe fourth on the list, so I have no way to attribute any of it. Mine has been in the wall since May and my phone reads what it read in May, which proves nothing either way. The other thing I never settled is the counterfeit warning that comes up in every UGREEN thread, because I spent ten minutes comparing my box against the pictures on UGREEN's site and the pins fold right and the SKU reads 90878, and I have no idea what a good fake would look like.