Tired of cables that feel like they’re about to break? Belkin is looking to make cords that won’t wear down with a new range working across USB Type C and Lightning.
I’m sitting here playing with cable thickness and strength and wondering why this hasn’t been highlighted sooner.
The more plugs and cables I take out with more, the worse they seem to wear. Not to the point where they’ve necessarily broken yet, but to the point where I fear they will.
And a broken cable is a terrible thing.
It comes out of the blue. You’re all set to charge your device, so you plug it in and nothing happens.
‘This worked yesterday,’ you tell yourself after strangling the coil of cables back from the mess it once was, and yet all of a sudden it doesn’t.
The thing is there’s more to cables than just a cord connecting two points. There’s the core of the cable where the wires go, the cable around it, and the connectors for the plug themselves. Not all cables and plugs are made equal, and sometimes they break.
But some cables are better than others, and this week, that’s what Belkin is trying to get across in a new range, the DuraTek Plus, with a cable built with Aramid to strengthen resistance against the cables inside, complete with double braided nylon on the outside to resist damage. The head of the plug uses thermoplastic elastomers also known as “TPE”, a mixture of plastic and rubber that’s durable and absorbs stress.
In essence, the DuraTek Plus is a more resistant cable, or more resistant than your standard cable, though it’s not completely perfect.
Our one dilemma for the DuraTek Plus range is that Belkin doesn’t make the cable in the form-factor we want: the universal cable it released last year.
In fact, if you want one of the Aramid cables in the DuraTek Plus range, you’ll have to choose either a standard USB to Type C or Lightning, or a USB Type C to Lightning, with no microUSB option and no Type C to Type C.
On the plus side, the cables arrive in up to three metres, complete with a leather strap to keep the cables coiled without going crazy inside your bag, handy in a day and age where it’s normal for a pair of wired earphones to do exactly that.
You’ll find them in stores now, where they retail from $39.95 locally.
