previous picks, and Anker’s cable is easy to recommend.
Our pick
Anker PowerLine Micro USB (3ft)
Anker’s PowerLine cables are fast, sturdy, and inexpensive, plus they come with a great warranty.
Anker’s PowerLine cables charge Micro-USB accessories and devices at their maximum speed.1 The cables also address the number one request of our readers: durability. Anker builds its PowerLine cables with Kevlar fiber and PVC strain-relief collars that should prevent fraying during normal use. The cables are also affordable, with even the most-expensive model—the 10-foot length—priced at less than $10. Add Anker’s solid reputation for hardware quality, the company’s well-regarded customer service, and an impressive 18-month warranty, and you can see why this cable is our pick.
Why you should trust me
From March 2011 to July 2014, I was the accessories editor at iLounge. During my tenure I reviewed more than 1,000 products, including dozens upon dozens of cables. Some were great, and others literally fell apart in my hands. While at The Wirecutter, I’ve tested more than 100 additional cables, gaining solid insight into what to look for in a good cable.
How we picked
You’ll find hundreds of different Micro-USB cables for sale, and for good reason: With the exception of Apple products (which use Lightning-to-USB cables), almost every modern portable device charges with a cable that has a standard USB Type-A plug on one side and a USB 2.0 Micro-B connector on the other. Many portable hard drives also use such a cable, for both power and data transfers. (Some recent smartphones use USB-C, but they’re few and far between. A few devices still use USB 3.0 Micro-B plugs, but that connector has all but disappeared from phones and tablets.) Not sure which plugs are which? Here’s a great illustrated reference.
For the previous version of this guide, we sent more than 30 cables to a former NASA engineer, who tore them apart to examine their internals; we also tested each cable’s charging and data-transfer rates. But in that testing and over the months and years that we’ve been using those cables for long-term testing, we found no real differences, in charging or data-transfer performance, between our top picks and other good models. As long as a cable was properly constructed—and most models from known, reputable vendors are—it worked great.
What we did notice was if the cables started to come apart over extended use. And reader comments, along with customer reviews on sites such as Amazon.com, indicate that the biggest complaint about cables is that they eventually break, especially if you aren’t careful in how you plug and unplug them.
Because of these experiences and test results, we’re no longer testing dozens of cables—as I mentioned above, the good ones all test similarly, and even if they didn’t, we’d never be able to test enough of them to say, conclusively, which one is the “best.” In addition, cables are a commodity product, and even well-known companies such as Monoprice and Amazon routinely discontinue cables and replace them with different models, or silently change construction or components.
Instead, for this update we looked for cables that let you transfer data and charge devices as quickly as possible, come from a reputable company at the right price, and have proven to be durable in long-term testing. No cable will last forever, but we’re confident that our pick will last as long as anything else you can get at a reasonable price.
In other words, these are the cables we’d buy ourselves. If you find something that better meets your personal criteria, that’s terrific! Our pick is simply a great option that we don’t hesitate to recommend.
Our pick
A sturdy build is part of what makes Anker’s PowerLine cable particularly appealing.
