Belkin BoostCharge Pro Stand review

A few years ago, even the best wireless chargers were bulky, slow and expensive. Nowadays, that's no longer the case. With the arrival of things like MagSafe and Qi2, cord-free charging isn't nearly as much of a compromise. 

The Belkin BoostCharge Pro Stand is a great showcase of this trend in action. It's a little more expensive than an average entry-level wireless charger, but that premium brings with it plenty of additional flexibility.

In Australia, the Belkin BoostCharge Pro Stand starts at $99. That's a little cheaper than its Pad counterpart, but still pretty pricey. That said, there aren't that many Qi2 chargers on the market so it does have that going for it. Plus, you can always save by shopping around.

Check out the table below for a round-up of deals for the Belkin BoostCharge Pro Stand.

Fresh out of the box, the Belkin BoostCharge Pro Stand is white, rubberised in texture and shaped like a hockey puck.  There's a faint circle printed on the top, which aligns with a set of magnets on the inside of the charger, and a USB-C port on the back, which is used to power the peripheral. Corners are very much not the vibe here, though there is a set of grooves on the side that make it easy to pick up.

If that tilt towards minimalism sounds a little boring, the good news is that the Belkin BoostCharge Pro Stand is more than it appears to be. Pulling on the aforementioned grooves extends the accessory from a charging pad into its stand configuration.

The pitch from Belkin here is that this is a perfect match for the StandBy mode that Apple recently added to the iPhone, but nothing is stopping you from using it with an Android device. In either case, the brushed aluminium stand here is surprisingly sturdy. It's also fairly flexible, with between 0 degrees and 75 degrees at either end.

There's a clumsiness to adjusting these angles while a device is sitting atop the charger, so you'll want to remove it before doing so. Still, it is fairly easy to adjust as needed so no complaints.

While the Belkin BoostCharge Pro Stand largely lives and dies on its design, the performance is far from a weak link. It's a high-performance wireless charger that's super compact and surprisingly flexible. It was extremely easy to set up and even easier to use.

As always, the presence of magnetic coils here helps solve any of the alignment-related issues that can come up when dealing with wireless charging. The fact that you're able to get faster charging of up to 15W makes the additional versatility you have when it comes to the form factor that much easier to appreciate.

Those faster charging speeds are such a "back of the box" feature that it feels silly and obvious to call them out but the less time you have to spend charging your phone, the more time you have for other things. Even if 15W is quickly becoming the new standard for wireless charging and well behind where faster-wired charging is nowadays, there's not much to nitpick here.

That said, this specific combination of performance and price might not be for everyone. Even if you are gaining some extra time in your day, you're also paying for it in other ways. You could be paying this much for something that charges two things at once (or uses wires to charge one thing much faster) and for a lot of people, that trade-off might make more sense.

Similarly, if you're not going to use this thing as a stand then it might not make sense to shell out for that flexibility. For those who can make full use of the flexibility here and don't want a secondary set of charging coils then the Belkin BoostCharge Pro Stand is as close to the best version of this idea as you're gonna find out there.