Earlier this year I bought a Kensington all-purpose travel adapter. It sounded like a good idea. It supposedly would act as an adapter for all the different plug-ins I deal with in my travel: American, British and European models. It would supposedly be able to receive plugs from each type, which is great as I have electronics bought in the American, British and European models. It would supposedly also be able to fit in each of the three wall plug-ins. It would allow me to leave behind the myriad of different adapters I would carry around with me, including the frustrating Italian model for a country where the prongs of the plug on the sockets of the plug-in are slightly smaller than the standard European model, requiring a separate adapter.
I made a mistake. I took off on a trip without my old adapters, without having first tested out the Kensington adapter. It turned out to have a major flaw. Its sockets were too small for the round prongs of my European plugs and also for the third round prong for my American model laptop plug. This meant I could not use the Kensington model for either my laptop or my travel iron, two of the most important electronic devices I travel with. This made the adapter essentially worthless, while I was left scrambling looking for adapters in each country I visited on my trip. This was annoying because it was a lot of work to find the adapters in some cities, taking up time I did not need to loose while traveling and would not have had I not bought the Kensington plug.
So while it is a good idea, I give the Kensington adapter a failing grade for both not working and the inconvenience it caused me on my recent business trip. Hopefully a better model will come along. I also wasted $35 on it, more than the cost of all my other adapters, which I also had to then buy back again while traveling.
The top picture is of the Kensington adapter from the side. The bottom picture was the horror of my laptop plug being stuck in the sockets of the Kensington adapter, which actually bent the third prong of my laptop plug. Fortunately I was able to extract it without further damage.
