This toaster-looking gadget boosts your phone’s battery in seconds
I didn’t have “phone toaster” on my CES bingo card, but here we are. Swippitt is a unique solution to the problem of keeping your phone battery charged up, and it promises a life where you basically never have to plug your phone into a charger again. But it’ll cost you. To be clear, there isn’t an actual toaster involved. Swippitt — which rhymes with “whip it,” and I’m sorry you have that song stuck in your head now — includes a system of interchangeable batteries that fit into specially designed phone cases. You use your phone like normal, and the extra battery charges your phone through a power connector integrated into the case — much like plenty of other battery cases on the market. Swippitt charging system and cases Swippitt’s Link phone case holds a battery in place while it’s in use and allows it to be swapped when placed in the hub. But instead of having to recharge the external battery, you swap it out. To change the battery out for a new one, you insert your phone, case and all, into the Swippitt Hub, which is the toaster-looking bit. Inside the hub, a fully charged battery is swapped into your case, the old one is retained to recharge, and your phone is ready to go with a fresh external battery. The whole thing happens within seconds. The demo unit I saw was pretty noisy about it all, but I’m told final production models will have much better sound dampening. Each external battery provides an extra 3,500mAh, which is roughly 50 to 90 percent extra charge, depending on the size of your phone’s battery. That power is available immediately to begin charging your phone, or if you’re topping off a battery that’s not super low, it can sit in reserve until needed. An accompanying app lets you set lots of different parameters — things like limiting the charging of your phone’s battery to 80 percent to extend its lifespan, dictating certain times of day to charge your phone, that kind of thing..