ChargeCard pocket iPhone charger starts shipping, we go hands- and wallets-on
Perhaps we all bemoaned the death of the 30-pin dock connector accessories a little prematurely. Apple may be moving away from the technology in a huge way, but it seems the category's got a little juice left in her after all. On the back of a successful Kickstarter campaign last summer (raising a bit more than three times its proposed $50,000), the duo behind ChargeCard took their iPhone charger on the road to Las Vegas in January. Roughly half a year after hitting its goal, the product has finally started shipping, with one of the units making its way to our desk just this week.
The ChargeCard's clever in its simplicity, a credit card-sized device made from ABS (think: Lego) plastic. A little rubberized arm lives in the center of the thing, unfolding and plugging into a USB port. One edge of the card, meanwhile, fits into your iPhone's port (assuming, of course, that you're not one of those fancy pants iPhone 5 owners, you big shot, you). And, well, that's pretty much all there is to the thing.
Shove it in your wallet and forget about it, until your phone runs out of juice (or you stumble upon it while fumbling for that damn Metro card) -- as advertised, it fit quite nicely into our wallet, and once in there, it was easy enough to ignore. The card's a bit pliable, with rubberized edges -- one gets the feeling you might be able to snap it in half, if you really had your heart set on it, but as it stands, it should hold up to more than a few aggressive sitdowns on your billfold.
At $25 a pop, it's not exactly an impulse buy, but may make sense for those who can't get through a day on single charge with their last-legged iPhone 4. Android owners with anemic batteries will be happy to learn that there's also a microUSB version floating around, and yes, Mr. and Mrs. moneybags, there's a version for your iPhone 5 coming out, too, but you'll have to wait until mid-May.
