Review and Giveaway: OneAdaptr Twist+ World Charging Station and Twist+ World Adapter Duo

Summer is coming soon, and that means that Apple fans around the world will be heading out on vacation. If your travel plans include traveling to a place that doesn’t use the same type of power plug that your home country does, you might find yourself searching around for a plug adapter so your MacBook, iPhone or iPad can get powered up. Today we’re looking at the OneAdaptr Twist+ World Charging Station ($44.99) and Twist+ World Adapter Duo (coming soon, no price listed) universal power adapters that are designed not only to easily get your MacBook the juice it needs but to charge up four (Twist+ World Adapter Duo) or five (Twist+ World Charging Station) more devices at the same time.

Design

The Twist+ World Adapter Duo and Twist+ World Charging Station look about the same, featuring a cylindrical section that plugs into whatever wall socket you happen to find. On the back of the devices are an ingenious set of plugs that pop out to let you plug in anywhere.

The bottom of the device is designed to plug onto your MacBook power adapter (after removing the “duck head” that contains the plugs), while the front of the cylinder has two (Twist+ World Adapter Duo) or four (Twist+ World Charging Station) USB ports. The front of the Twist+ World Adapter Duo features a universal outlet — kind of the “female” equivalent to the universal plug on the other end.

To switch between the US, EU, UK or AU type plugs, there’s a rotating section in the middle of the adapter. It locks into place with the plugs hidden for transport in one position, moves the UK plugs into place with a twist in one direction, pushes out the EU plugs with a rotation in the opposite direction, and finally can show the US and AU plugs when rotated all the way in the opposite direction. The US plugs can be rotated by hand to an angle to fit AU sockets.

The Twist+ World Adapter Duo weighs in at 6.26 ounces (177.5 g) while the World Charging Station is slightly heavier at 6.34 ounces (180 g). Neither of the plugs will take up too much space in your luggage: the World Charging Station measures 2.28 x 2.28 x 3.41 inches (58 x 58 x 86.5 mm) and the World Adapter Duo is 3.31 x 2.28 x 3.41 inches in size (84 x 58 x 86.5 mm).

Function

Although I haven’t had the opportunity to try these in action on foreign outlets, I did try using this on the US sockets in my home and it worked great. Other adapters I’ve used in the past didn’t have the locking capability and the plugs would often “collapse” as I tried to push them into the socket.

The photos in the gallery below show how the plugs pop out of the rear of the World Charging Station based on the rotation of the center section of the adapter, as well as how the MacBook adapter can be plugged in.

Called “Roaming Mantis,” the initial attacks mostly targeted South East Asia, but now the malware has been updated with the capability to specifically target users across Europe and the Middle East. The folks behind the criminal campaign have expanded attacks to cater for 27 different languages — including English, Spanish, Hebrew, Chinese, Russian and Hindi — in order to help coordinate successful infections, according to ZDNet. The additional languages have been added via an automatic translator.

Details on Roaming Mantis have been detailed by researchers at security company Kaspersky Lab, who also examined the previous campaign. “The Roaming Mantis campaign evolved significantly in a short period of time,” says Kaspersky researcher Suguru Ishimaru. “The rapid growth of the campaign implies that those behind it have a strong financial motivation and are probably well-funded.”

While only 150 successful attacks have been identified in the wild, Kaspersky Lab warns that it could only represent a “tiny fraction of the overall picture” because DNS hijacking can make it difficult to identify detections.

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