Oakter 65W GaN charger review: One-stop solution for charging needs

Rating: 3.5/5

Multiple smartphone brands have dropped the charging brick from their boxes as they move toward environmental responsibility. The intention is admirable: fewer accessories, less waste but the reality for most people looks rather different. If you own a laptop, a smartphone, a pair of wireless earbuds and a tablet, you are likely still surrounded by a tangle of adapters and cables collected over the years, essentially defeating the very purpose of saving the environment.

Enters Oakter’s 65W GaN charger that is making a straightforward pitch: replace all of them with this one small brick without burning a hole in your pocket. At Rs 1,599, it is one of the more affordable GaN chargers on the Indian market. But does the price come at the cost of performance? After spending time with it, the answer is largely reassuring.

Build and design

The Oakter 65W GaN charger is compact and lighter than you might expect for something capable of powering a MacBook Air or a Samsung Windows laptop. The all-white finish is clean and unfussy, and the standard three-pin Indian plug means it works straight out of the box across Indian households and offices without any adapter needed. The package includes a 1.5-metre USB-C to USB-C cable.

Now before getting into the performance, it is worth understanding what makes a GaN charger different from the standard adapter that came in the box with your phone or laptop. GaN stands for Gallium Nitride, which is a semiconductor material that is significantly more efficient than the traditional silicon used in most chargers.

The result is a charger that generates less heat, wastes less energy and can be built into a much smaller body than a conventional adapter of the same wattage – which is precisely what Oakter is offering here. The charger carries BIS certification — the Bureau of Indian Standards mark that confirms it has been tested and approved for the Indian market.

Performance

The headline claim is 65W Power Delivery, and in testing, the charger lives up to it. We connected it to a Samsung Windows laptop (Galaxy Book 6 Pro), it charges at a pace that is comparable to its own adapter. It is 78.07 Wh battery. During our testing, the the laptop charged 60% in an hour.

We used it to juice up our Pixel 10 Pro XL that has a 5,200mAh battery with 45W fast charging support. The fast charging engaged immediately and the phone reached a healthy charge level in a fraction of the time a standard adapter would take. We started charging our phone at 13% and in 20 minutes, it reached 52%.

Crucially, the charger stayed relatively cool during charging the phone but got slightly warm when charging a laptop but never uncomfortably so. This is due to the built-in protections cover overheating, short circuits and voltage spikes, which provides a basic but important level of assurance when you are plugging a costly laptop into any third-party adapter.

Verdict

For Rs 1,599, the Oakter 65W GaN charger is a well-built, sensibly priced and genuinely useful piece of kit. The GaN technology delivers on its promise: the charger is compact, runs cool, and charges quickly. The Oakter 65W GaN charger makes the most sense for anyone who wants a single, reliable, travel-friendly charger that can handle a modern laptop and a smartphone without breaking the bank. It is well suited to thin and light notebooks, MacBook Air users, anyone with a USB-C Android phone, iPad owners and professionals who move between home, office and travel and want to carry as little as possible.