Portable wireless chargers are one of those ideas that seems better on paper than in practice. The idea of being able to stick a charger in your pocket with your phone, and it’ll magically charge while you walk with no cable required runs into the problem of keeping the phone and charger aligned enough to actually charge. But Kickstarter-funded battery pack Yoolox may have found the solution at with an odd analog approach: use a bunch of rubber suction cups to keep your phone and charger stuck together.
I got to demo the Yoolox pack at CES 2019, and despite my skepticism, it actually seemed to work pretty well. My phone setup is probably a best-case scenario for the Yoolox: the glass back of my case-less iPhone X is a perfect surface for suction cups to stick to, but I saw demos with leather and plastic cases that looked equally functional. The Yoolox suction cups are strong, too. They can support the full weight of an iPhone hanging upside down (although maybe don’t risk your $1,000 phone like I did).
Specs on the Yoolox are middling for the $79 price tag: its a 10,000mAh charger with both USB-C and USB-A outputs. (The USB-C port can also be used to charge it, as can an additional Micro USB port.) But with just a 5W output for wireless charging, it’s not the fastest option out there.
Still, suction cups! Who’d have thought?