What is the Anker 'smart display charger' and what does that screen even do?

Anker has long been known for creating some of the most popular chargers on the market . Since the company's founding in 2011, there's been continual innovation across its product lines and diversification into new markets like portable projectors and smart home devices, but it's always stayed true to its charging accessory roots .

One of the company's newest endeavors is a range of plug-in wall chargers that feature a smart display. Though Anker has long sold devices that deliver baseline information like power levels and feature cheeky visual Easter eggs, like Anker's Laptop Power Bank , the new smart display does a little bit more. It can adapt to your charging needs, supply additional data and even offer a little bit of cuteness.

Anker's smart display shows several key bits of information about your charging, with the goal of making typically hidden data easily readable. At a glance, it can display the temperature, charging mode, charging status, the real-time power wattage the charger is outputting and, for supported devices, the battery progress of the item being charged.

Anker's philosophy behind the display stems from the fact that charging is dynamic — things like battery level or temperature can change the speed at which a device charges, and having more information takes a lot of the guesswork out of why your tech might be reacting in a certain way.

The smart display is designed to make sure everything is operating as it should, and to make any necessary troubleshooting simpler. If power levels are shown to be inexplicably low, for example, you can see if it's simply due to overheating or whether you might need to consider replacing your power cable.

As well as displaying lots of useful information, the smart display also features an adorable little charging buddy. It's essentially a smiley digital blob that interacts using a number of cute animations, like taking a nap or swinging a baseball bat. As the plug is sensitive to touch, it'll look happy when patted once on the head, or appear unsteady with swirly eyes when the top of the plug is aggressively tapped.

Anker products utilize multiple proprietary features to make charging both safer and faster. PowerIQ has become a standard inclusion across the company's entire charger and power bank lineup, which intelligently allocates power based on the connected device. Apple's iPhone 17 Pro, for instance, requires a different wattage to charge at top speed than Samsung's Galaxy S26.

Most newer Anker devices also contain ActiveShield technology, which encourages safe charging by combining temperature sensing with a tuner chip to actively adjust the current needed. The most recent version of ActiveShield performs 3 million temperature checks daily.