Elago's Aluminum Dock is Perfect For Charging All Your Lightning Devices

The Elago Aluminum Dock is one of those things that once you have it, you can’t imagine going back to life without a charging dock. It’s easy to use and the design is pretty simple with it basically being a round aluminum cylinder sandwiched between two rubber circles, one that serves as the base, which gives it good grip on pretty much any surface, and the other, on top which protects your iPhone or whatever else you have on there from scratching.

It doesn’t come with a Lightning cable, so you’ll have to get your own. Elago recommends using the “original” Apple Lightning cable, but I’ve had no problem with my third-party Lighting cable from AmazonBasics. I recommend getting the AmazonBasics Lightning cable in either 3ft in the color that corresponds to the color of your charging stand. In this case, I went black on black. I love it, especially now that I have the matte black iPhone 7.

That said, you can also get this stand in a nice silver/white finish and I think it would look great with a white Lightning cable paired with a white-faced iPhone.

Once you have your stand set up, using it is fairly straight forward. Just put your iPhone or your other Lightning-equipped device on the dock and you’re all set. Because the stand is somewhat light, when you lift up your phone, it’s possible that the stand will lift up with it. This isn’t a big deal for me, but I could see how some people might find that annoying. It could be because my cable is connected really well, but I’d rather have that than a loose connection.

Because this charging dock isn’t specifically built for any particular device, like say, an iPhone, you can use it with a wide-range of Lightning-equipped devices. I currently use it to charge my iPhone, my AirPods, my Apple TV Siri remote and even my Magic Trackpad and Magic Keyboard. Yes, I know those last two sound crazy, but I usually just put them on overnight ever few weeks so I don’t have to worry about the battery ever dying.

When it comes to the iPad, this dock really only works with the iPad mini because of its size and weight. Once you move up to the 9.7-inch iPad Air 2 or iPad Pro, this dock is just too light to hold these iPads up.

All-in-all, I enjoy using this dock a lot. I use it daily to charge my iPhone and my AirPods and occasionally to charge other Apple peripherals that I own. Its simple design works and the price is great for what you get. If you’re the kind of person who’s looking for this sort of product, I highly recommend it.