This is just a fancy stand and battery charger. But, honestly, that works really well for me. I’ve tried some of the chargers that have the replacement battery covers and metal contacts, but there seems to be some variation in the size of the batter cover for the controllers. This is just a door to a two compartment battery charger. The other compartment is just for already charged batteries. At this point, given the problems I have had with inconsistent battery cover size, I like this solution better. I mean you could literally use this thing for any Ni-MH (Nickel-Metal Hydride) AA size battery. Sadly, that does mean that it is not compatible with lithium ion batteries.
The stand itself is just that – a stand. It is comprised of clear acrylic pieces that do nothing but look neat due to their fiberoptic properties and the RGB LEDs in the base. As most acrylic pieces do, they come covered in a protective plastic. As with most protective plastic, removing it is an aggravating endeavor. I can tell you scrape near the edges of where the plastic bends – you can see a bit of texture to the protective plastic and use this to determine whether or not you are actually removing it.
The stand is about twice as tall as it needs to be to keep the controllers resting in the side acrylic pieces with holes off the ground. The piece for the headset sits at the same height.
There is only one button, and to be honest, for it’s function, I would not have put it where it is. The button does only one thing – turn on or off the RGB lighting. Unlike a few other such gadgets, you cannot cycle through different types of lighting. Want solid blue? You get rainbow cycling and you like it! Or you can turn it off.
But, about where that button is located. I thought it was a release latch for the batter compartment cover. Nope, you just pluck that off by getting your finger nail under there. I would have placed this button on the side, away from the cover to avoid confusion.
And lastly, the USB cord. Yep, CORD, no S. And it’s short. I assume they expect me to plug THEIR cord into the headset, and then the headset cord into the base. I don’t like this. I paid $70 for that headset cord, for two reasons. One, I like the L termination into the headset. And two, albeit I haven’t gotten it to work yet, it’s suppose to be a link cable, so it’s plugged into my desktop which is hard to reach. I’m not unplugging that! Furthermore, every time you introduce a connection in a cabling scheme, you reduce the overall efficacy of that cabling scheme. By plugging in the charge cable to the base and then the cable from the base to the headset, you have introduced two new interconnects where potential power losses can occur. That is not ideal for a charging system – hope there’s an amp on that PCB in there.
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