Wires suck. They’re either always too long or too short, they break easily, and they never ever stay untangled. But now it’s a new year, and what better way to start out 2018 than by cutting out wires completely from your life?
Avido’s new wirelessly charging battery pack, the WiBa, certainly has. The WiBa looks a lot like any other battery pack — it’s a small, oblong rectangle roughly the size of a phone — but it completely cuts the cord. Everything about the WiBa is designed to work sans cords: it charges itself wirelessly through a Qi charger, and it then charges your phone wirelessly (also using the Qi standard) when you’re out and about.
The WiBa is expected to cost $99.95 when it goes on sale later this year, which gets you the wireless charging pad (which you can use as a standard Qi charging pad) and the battery pack. But the pack itself is only a 5,000mAh pack, which — wireless charging aside — makes this an expensive proposition.
Sure, there’s an included USB-C port to manually charge up the battery pack and a USB Type A port to plug in a cable to recharge your phone the old fashioned way (in what, to be honest, is probably faster and more reliable to use on the go versus carefully making sure your phone is aligned with the inductive coil in your pocket). But who has time for that? It’s 2018, and wires are dead.
All kidding aside, the WiBa does speak to a larger trend of wireless charging continuing to grow as a true universal standard beyond just phones in the longer term, even if its a little impractical of an idea for day-to-day use.
The WiBa isn’t the first battery pack to support wireless charging for phones — Mophie for example has its Charge Force Powerstation, which costs the same $99.95 as the WiBa and offers twice the capacity at 10,000mAh. But the WiBa is the first one we’ve seen that goes fully wireless by allowing you to recharge the pack itself using a wireless charger. Other packs like Mophie’s are sadly chained to a physical tether.
But if the idea of cutting your charging cable sounds appealing, you’ll be able to throw out your wires when the WiBa ships in February.