It's go a coiled part which helps reduce the yanking stress on the connectors. I tried using both the microUSB and lightning connectors at the same time, and it seemed to work?! That kind of surprised me but maybe if they're just connected in parallel effectively I guess why not? I wasn't able to determine what the charging rate was, I assume halved on each of the devices since it was all coming out of one USBA port. This is going into the car so I don't have to carry a bunch of different cables to accomodate different passenger phone types.