Great and fairly cheap car charger by TomTom

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Hi guys!

Last week I was shopping around at a local electronics retailer when I noticed a car charger made by TomTom for a decent price (I paid ~18 Euros).

It has two USB ports, one of whom is rated at 2.1A and the other at 1A. It also has a 12V car pass-through jack, so you can plug in another 12V device.

I saw it available at Amazon.de and .co.uk:

UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/TomTom-Unive.../ref=de_a_smtd
£10.89

DE: http://www.amazon.de/TomTom-High-Spe...7522692&sr=8-4
€18.35

I thought, you might be interested

Being a frugal shopper I've tried to scrimp on car chargers and leads and adapters for my ZTE Blade and more recently my Note and I've also spent time and effort ripping them apart to solder pins to try to encourage fast charging of my Note. While they can all charge a sleeping phone perfectly well, not one combination of bits and pieces has succeeded in keeping my Note charged while using CoPilot sat nav.

So finally I bit the bullet and bought the proper Samsung 1 Amp charger from Amazon. It was £10 with free delivery and has proved an instant hit, successfully topping up the charge in the phone while running the sat nav app. Why oh why did I not buy it sooner. It would have saved money and grief.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B...00_i00_details

(It's now even cheaper than when I bought it, costing just £9.80 today.)

p.s. the supplied coiled lead is quite short when tightly coiled, which can be a good thing if it doesn't need to go far, but if you have a long distance to cover it might be a problem. I haven't tried stretching it to see how far it might go as I'm happy with it as is and don't want it to go all loose and floppy.

Here is a great two output usb car charger, one of which supports high output current.. less that $10

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...00_i00_details

Read the third review of that charger, by K Crawford. You may wish to reconsider.

As I stated in my previous post I have bought a couple of different "high current" car chargers and neither one will charge the Note quickly enough to maintain or increase charge while running satnav. It's all to do with the black arts involved in triggering the phone to draw the current that is potentially available. I've tried tweaking the chargers themselves (shorting the two centre pins) and also tried using the Note's supplied USB lead with them, but to no avail. A high current charger is no use if the phone refuses to draw current above the "safe" 500mA USB standard. That's the problem with many of these third party chargers, be they mains or car. I've spent more money in total on "cheap" solutions than it would have cost to buy the original item in the first place.

This looks like one of them - http://www.dealextreme.com/p/car-cig...c-12-24v-48029

And this looks similar to the other - http://www.dealextreme.com/p/designe...-charger-72932

Maybe they were both simply too cheap, but whatever the reason they did not meet the needs. This is why I finally caved and bought the real deal, by Samsung, and now my car charging woes are over.

Originally Posted by tdodd

Being a frugal shopper I've tried to scrimp on car chargers and leads and adapters for my ZTE Blade and more recently my Note and I've also spent time and effort ripping them apart to solder pins to try to encourage fast charging of my Note. While they can all charge a sleeping phone perfectly well, not one combination of bits and pieces has succeeded in keeping my Note charged while using CoPilot sat nav.

So finally I bit the bullet and bought the proper Samsung 1 Amp charger from Amazon. It was £10 with free delivery and has proved an instant hit, successfully topping up the charge in the phone while running the sat nav app. Why oh why did I not buy it sooner. It would have saved money and grief.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B...00_i00_details

(It's now even cheaper than when I bought it, costing just £9.80 today.)

p.s. the supplied coiled lead is quite short when tightly coiled, which can be a good thing if it doesn't need to go far, but if you have a long distance to cover it might be a problem. I haven't tried stretching it to see how far it might go as I'm happy with it as is and don't want it to go all loose and floppy.

This will get you the same item in the USA.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...00_i00_details

kraz