The IT Nerd

I recently came across ZUS when I was looking for a car charger for my car. You see, even though I own a five passenger SUV, it only has a single USB port which doesn’t charge devices all that fast. So to head off any potential arguments with my wife on road trips, I spent $29.99 USD on the ZUS. Here’s what it looks like when it’s plugged into the 12V outlet in my car:

It bills itself as a car charger that charges your phone or tablet at twice the speed of your car. On that front it delivers. I can say that it took my iPhone from an 80% charge to 89% in a 25 minute drive. If I used the USB port built into the car, it would have only added three or four percent of charge to my phone. It also allows you to charge two devices at the same time which is handy as well. When the ZUS is plugged in to the 12V outlet, it softly lights the surrounding area and lets you know your device is charging. It’s also built to meet the US Military MIL-STD-810G high temperature standard, which means that it will survive a day in your car in the heat of the summer.

Now, that all sounds cool, but it has one additional trick. It can help you find you car if you have a habit of losing track of it in a big parking lot as in the ones that you find in shopping centers. It pairs to your phone via Bluetooth and has an app that’s available on iOS and Android (which requires you to create an account using your e-mail address or a Facebook account) which has to be running in the background that tracks your current location in real time with minimal battery drain. When you shut off your car, ZUS disconnects from your phone and the app saves your current location. Now it takes up to 45 seconds to save your location, so make sure you don’t rush out of your car until it notifies that your location is saved. Once it is saved, you can set a parking timer so that if you pay for parking, you don’t accidentally let your parking expire and you go on your way. If you need to find your way back to your car, the app will lead you there in one of two ways:

This mode allows you to use your phone like a compass to lead you back to your car.

Alternately, you can use a map to do the same thing. The blue dot is me. The black dot with the “P” and the car symbol is my car. It works well as long as the phone can get a GPS lock on your location. That means that underground parking lots and the like are not going to work with ZUS. But the app does allow you to snap a picture of your surroundings so that you can have some way of finding your car in that circumstance.

Now one thing that I did test out is if you could use ZUS with multiple phones. You can. What I did was that I set up the app on my wife’s iPhone and logged into the app using the email address and password that I used when I set it up on my iPhone. It worked, but I had to turn it off Bluetooth on my iPhone so that ZUS would pair with my wife’s iPhone. Thus, it cannot be connected to two phones at the same time. That’s not a huge deal as you only need one phone connected for ZUS to work.

My verdict? This is a really good car charger for your phones and tablets that happens to have the ability to help you find your car in a huge parking lot. The price is right and I’d recommend it without hesitation.

This entry was posted on June 11, 2016 at 2:32 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Nonda. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.