These ultra-durable cables also make sure your phone doesn't overcharge

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/06/22/these-ultra-durable-cables-als.html

The amount of bullshit posts trying to shill stuff on the boingboing store really has reached peak crapware. We’ve seen cheap chinese earplugs marketed as ‘top of the line’, a plethora of other useless crap, and now these cables that are actually preventing most recent phones to properly do charge wear leveling on batteries. I’d be happy if you advertise quality/useful/non-fake items every once in a while, but this is too much. Sorry boingboing, it’s been fun, but I’m removing you from my feed. I’ll check back in a year or so to see if the real content is back.

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I’ve worked on mobile devices for years, we put a chip in them to prevent over charging. Often called a fuel gas chip, it records charge cycles and measures voltage to report charge level and discharge rate to the operating system.

Unless I see evidence to the contrary, this cable doesn’t make your mobile device work any better than the manufacturer intended.

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If Boingboing’s shop was anything other than the same shovelware logo-drop-in site used by the likes of Groupon, Popular Mechanics, and the Daily Caller (reallly?) I might take these posts more seriously. Maybe it’s good that the crap being sold is so transparently bad. I guess at least they’re good enough to have “Boing Boing’s Shop” as the author of these posts for added clarity.

But still, given BB’s relationship with Cool Tools, I would think they’d have a vested interest in developing a “real” store with an actual curated collection of kit. That would be something I might actually shop from. As it is, any product I see being pitched on Boingboing I assume is utter shit unless the author is @frauenfelder or @xeni.

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This. I can’t imagine even the cheapest POS phone benefitting from this. About the only use I could see is if you have a device that you normally leave on the charger for extended periods (weeks at a time) this would help avoid the battery getting damaged from being effectively stored at full charge (which can shorten the lifespan), assuming it actually shuts off the charging long enough to let the battery run down by the required 5 to 10% before the charging circuit kicks back on.

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My Moto E2 doesn’t over charge. Neither did my previous Samsung flip phone.

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please just put up a patreon i want to be a “shiny pokemon mutant”

monthly donations will get me no product spam, some kind of fun little avatar flair (i’m thinking GOLD FRINGES) and an exclusive monthly rant from cory typed directly after exiting a tsa checkpoint

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I’ve had some really bottom-end smartphones over the years (anyone remember the Motorola FlipOut?) and none of them have ever had a problem with overcharging.

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But, but, but… BLINKENLIGHTS !

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I actually like the BoingBoing store, and don’t mind the ads for it.

But $28 for a cable? It better perform sexual favors for me at that price.

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Oh BoingBoing store, I love you but you’re bringing me down…

Oh. High speed copper. Welp, I’m sold. This’ll go grate with my $10,000 gold tipped unidirectional digital ethernet speaker cables.

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