Wireless Charging Indeed

“THIS is the way wireless charging should be.”

We wish we could say that. We LOVE saying shit like that.

But it’s a lie. Because wireless charging is a lie.

There’s still a wire. It’s just like…over there a little bit.

It’s like the cloud. There’s no cloud. There’s just somebody else’s computer and it costs $9.99 a month to rent space.

No, some techno-asshat decided to call magnetic charging “wireless” at one point, making everyone (or maybe just us?) think that electricity was going to be arcing invisibly through the air to charge our devices as if by magic. You know…WIRELESSLY.

But whatever. Once you get past that initial bout of disappointment, you can focus on yet another bout of disappointment. The second bout of disappointment is when you realize that those cool wireless charging pads (the ones with the wire sticking out of them) make your phone a real pain to use while it’s charging.

If you’re responsible and have your life together enough to be able to charge you phone without messing with it, that’s great. But if you just barely managed to chuck the thing on the pad before it died and then need to continue a video conference call, you’re pretty much out of luck. See also: watching a show, messing with your music, or finishing the exhausting text conversation that drained your battery along with your will to live in the first place.

Charging pads are terrible for all of the above and more. What you really want, it turns out, is this slick charging stand that looks like a soda can from a sci-fi movie. Not only will it hold your phone, but it’ll hold it at an angle that makes it possible to actually use—in portrait or landscape, no less. Also, by flipping the top up, you reveal a second charging pad for your AirPods. Because the other thing that’s annoying about charging stuff is having to charge many stuffs at once. Here at least you can do two at a time.

So yeah. As charging goes, this is pretty great.

As far as wirelessness?

Meh.