Initially I was like, “Why am I writing about a USB cable?” Then I read the little description and was like, “Oh, neat.” Yes, I used the word “neat” like a schoolgirl in 1954. Anyhow, the cable blocks data synchronization. Why would you ever want that?

Let’s say you have your phone or whatever synced to your home PC. You come home from school or work, plug it in, and let it both charge and sync. Nothing too crazy.

But what if you go to a friend’s house and need to charge said device? You don’t want to use a standard USB cable and have all these applications popping up complaining, “This device is synced with another PC. Please drop what you’re doing and close the 800 windows we’ve just opened up for no reason.” It’s such a hassle!

That’s where this bad boy comes in. There’s a switch on the side that turns off the syncing capability of the cable. Amazing. The point is, with the switch activated, you can safely plug our device into a PC, have it charge just fine, but not pop up the 47 syncing programs on the alien PC. Handy if it’s handy, I think you can say.