Kiwi Design RGB Vertical Charging Stand for Quest review

Today I’m going to review the RGB Vertical Charging Stand that Kiwi Design sent me for evaluation. I think it’s a great addition to my desk, let me tell you why in this post.

Unboxing and setup

The RGB Vertical Charging Stand comes in a nice box, where it is disassembled in a few pieces. The user has to set it up by following very simple instructions. Putting all the pieces together required me something like 2 minutes. I suggest you follow the instructions on the little pamphlet because the ones on the box lid do not explain how to attach the magnetic USB connector.

You can see the video with my unboxing and the setup here below:

I made a little mistake in the assembly… but I fixed it in the end

Design

The stand has a vertical design that keeps the Quest in a position above the desk: it is not like the Quest Pro official charger that is very thin and lets you put your Quest basically on the desk. I think this is a more elegant choice because it looks like your Quest is there on a little shelf, it is a bit like you are showcasing it.

The shapes of the stand are pretty essential and the black color gives it an elegant touch, which contrasts well with the pure white of the Quest 2 and 3. It gets a bit too monochrome with a Quest Pro on, though.

The stand features a little shelf where to put the headset on, and two little arms that can be opened, with two circular holes where to put the controllers in. On the back of the product, there is a USB-C port where to plug the electricity and then on the side, there is another USB-C connector that is to be connected to the headset to charge it. Notice that the cable to connect the stand to a USB charger is not provided: I guess Kiwi Design assumes you’ve already plenty of them at home, but I personally disagree with this decision.

Front view of the stand with the Quest 3 on

Back view: you can see the cable bringing electricity to the device

Around the shelf, there is a little stripe that can emit some colored light effects. This is nice if you like to give more color to your desk, and fits well in your working area if you have some other colored gaming hardware. Below the little shelf, there are two buttons: one is to turn on/off this little colored stripe, and the other is to change the light pattern.

The two buttons to change the lighting on the device

All in all, it fits very well on my working desk, also because almost all the things I’ve there (my PC, laptop, keyboard, etc..) are black as well.

Charging the headset

The Kiwi Design RGB Vertical Charging Stand can charge the headset but not the controllers. This solves the problem of having always a charged headset, but not the problem of always having charged controllers. The Quest Pro official charging stand charges both (also because Quest Pro controllers have an integrated battery) and in my opinion this is the ideal scenario. Anyway, considering the low battery usage of Quest 3 controllers, also this solution is acceptable.

The little shelf of the stand has plugged in a USB-C connector made with rubber, that can connect with the headset. But it’s very interesting to see how it does that. This little USB-C connection rubber wire ends with a magnetic endpoint. You have another USB-C magnetic endpoint that you have to plug into your headset. This way, when you put the headset back into the stand, the two magnetic endpoints attach each other, bringing the power to the headset, and charging it. Thanks to this, it is possible to charge the device without having to worry about inserting the USB-C plug into the headset every time: you just put the headset on your shelf, and everything happens magically! The magnets are strong enough that they are able to find each other even if you don’t put your headset in the perfect position. I loved this.

via GIPHY

The problem with this solution is that it requires to have this little magnetic endpoint plugged into the USB-C port of the headset. This is perfectly acceptable if you just use your headset as a standalone device to play Gorilla Tag, but it is a bit of a nuisance in case you are a PCVR gamer and you use a wired Quest Link connection or you are a developer and you have to frequently upload builds to your device. In this case, you have to frequently remove this little dongle every time you want to connect the Quest to your PC.

Compatibility

I’m currently a Quest 3 user, so the first thing I did was check that the Kiwi Design RGB Vertical Charging Stand worked well with this headset. And it works great, both for the headset and the controllers.

The Quest 3 fits well the charging stand

I’ve tried it also successfully with Quest 2.

With Quest Pro, I’ve seen it works but slightly worse. First of all, the headset has a rigid strap, and if you don’t open the strap enough, it doesn’t fit the stand. Then, since the Quest Pro has magnets to support the lateral blinders, sometimes it happens that the magnetic connector of the stand tries to attach to the magnets of the headset instead of the one attached to the USB port of the device.

I wanted to try also if it can work with other non-supported headsets, so I attached to it my Pico 4 Enterprise. As you can see, it somehow fits, but the headset stays a bit in a weird position, and the rubber tube with the magnetic endpoint bends a bit too much to fit the headset’s height. The Pico 4 controllers of course can’t fit. Anyway it’s remarkable how it can be used also with non supported headsets.

Notice how the charging cable is bending a lot to work with Pico

Hands-on

I’ve used the stand for a few days and I have to say that it works great: it fits my desk, it keeps my headset charged, and it displays a colored light that I like. Thanks to the little rubber pads it has below, it is also quite stable and doesn’t move when I pick up the headset or the controller. The magnetic connection with my Quest 3 also does its job and I don’t have to care about how I put the headset to see it charged.

I have only three little negative feedback about it:

The arms that hold the controllers force me to take the controllers from their upper part. This is pretty unnatural, I would like to grab them from the handles, not from the part where the buttons are
As I’ve said, the little magnet I have to attach to the USB-C port of my headset prevents me from using that port for other purposes. So there is this little nuisance of having to put it off and on again sometimes
Sometimes the two magnetic endpoints attach to each other, but they do it in a slightly skewed way and the electricity doesn’t flow between them. I have to be careful to hear the sound the Quest 3 does when it starts charging: if I don’t hear the sound, then I have to slightly move the connectors to make them attach.

Price and availability

If you’re interested in buying this product, you can find it on Kiwi Design’s website: https://www.kiwidesign.com/products/rgb-vertical-stand. The retail price is $59.99/€56.95.

And that’s it for today! As usual, if you have any questions or considerations about this stand, let me know in the comments here below or on my social media channels!

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This article was originally published on skarredghost.com