So you get your new iPhone or smartphone home, you unpack it out of its lovely box, and then you prepare to use it. But first of course you take out the adapter and the charging cord. You plug those in and you get ready to enjoy the benefits of this new technology. However, little did you know that 12 months later that simple cord, your lifeline to your phone, would be a frayed and twisted mess. In fact, it’s now so unreliable that you don’t even know if your phone will charge at all, and that is scary. Very scary.

Fortunately, Nomad has created a line of durable all purpose smart phone and device charging cords. They are called “universal”, and even better, they don’t fray.

We recently tested three of the Nomad Universal Cables, and were extremely excited about the possibility. Normally charging cords and  cables are not such an exciting topic. But with Nomad’s you can actually feel in the very texture and design a product that might actually meet your needs. Not to mention they are composed of layers of rugged nylon, have a 5-Year warranty, are usable for almost all devices, and the term ballistic keeps getting included in the descriptions (probably because ‘kickass‘ is not a good marketing word).

The core cable is USB A to Micro USB. Attached are two tips, an MFi approved Lightning tip and a USB Type C tip enabling you to charge all iPhone, Android and other USB powered devices. The list of devices this makes it possible to support is therefore very long and impressive.

When we first tested the Nomad Universal Cables though we did run into a small embarrassment. We all kept trying to plug in each tip head individually into a device. Makes sense, right? Yet, when we did the devices would not charge. In fact there was no power going to them at all. Why was that? Well, we figured out that each tip head plugs in to the main tip head below it, through which the actual power flows.

Our original impression was that each tip head received its own power supply directly from the main cable, but upon closer inspection it turned out that each additional tip head was attached to the main cable via an extremely durable plastic mold. Any scientist or kid above the age of seven can tell you that electricity does not flow through a piece of plastic, so once we realized that there is no cord or cable going through the plastic then it became clear that you need to connect the tip heads one on top of the other. Fortunately, this is also a space saving setup, because it keeps multiple tip heads from flopping around when unused.

That “did you plug it in the power outlet?” blooper aside, the Nomad Universal Cables were exactly what we hoped they would be. Ironically, they provide a solution for an itch that we didn’t know we could actually scratch. No more frayed cables, no more multiple power cords.