This is awesome! For only $450 you can get a machine that can automatically swap battery packs placed on bulky $120 phone cases.
You don’t need to plug a cable in your phone anymore, your over engineered machine can swap battery packs for you
I never imagined that I would live this long to see the future
Swapable batteries were common on cell phones in the 80’s and 90’s except no fancy machine was needed.
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That’s whole century.
You mean a decade. A century is 100 years.
I mean /s
……fuck.
and… get this: while you were swapping your battery you could drop in a swappable expansion on storage. Utter madness.
Many phones let you upgrade storage without opening it. Madness, I know.
I was using an LG G5 that had swappable batteries 3 years ago.
IKR.
Why did we start building batteries into phones?
So they can sell you a new phone instead of a replacement battery.
Because we kept buying thinner and lighter phones, and gluing the battery in makes thinner and lighter phones with better battery life possible. As a convenient side effect glue creates a nice watertight seal that can make devices more water resistant.
Hrm maybe.
I mean a wristwatch can be 200m water resistant and still be user servicable. A simple rubber gasket, some silicone grease and some screws.
I imagine it’s a hell of a lot cheaper/simpler/more reliable in manufacturing to use the adhesive over screws, gaskets, and grease. It reduces both the BOM and the number of processes required to ship a unit, and probably fails less often, which means fewer RMAs. Plus it just plain takes up less space, which leaves more room for the battery.
I don’t like it, my favorite phone I’ve ever had was a Galaxy Nexus with a zerolemon battery that was bigger than the phone itself, but I can see why gluing everything together would be an attractive solution for the engineers who design these things.
90’s, definitely.
Which 80’s models mobiles are you thinking of, exactly?
The Motorola DynaTAC. They had a big Ni-Cd battery that is also the back of the case. You would need often need two batteries to get through a whole day, so they were made to be easily swapped.
So… you’re essentially carrying around a power bank on the back of your phone all the time? Seems like a gimmick at best.
Honestly, fast charging has turned this into such a non-issue that you’ll be hard pressed to find a more convenient solution.
Right?
$450 and a toaster to use something like the external batteries I’ve used for a decade.
I had one of those power bank cases, and it was absolutely awesome for extended battery life. It was always there with the phone, it was just a bulky case (which did not bother me), it tripled or quadrupled my battery life, and it was about $20.
Sorely missing that it’s not available for my current phone (Pixel 8a).
Magsafe case and a battery pack?
The biggest issue for me is compatibility.
Swippitt works with any phone as long as there’s a case designed for it. That way, a single hub can serve a whole household of people with different phone models.
Makes sense. Similar to the replacement phone batteries we used to have…
At launch, it will offer cases for the iPhone 14, 15, and 16 series, and the company plans to expand with Samsung Galaxy S series cases by the end of 2025.
Soo… They’ll support some iPhones at launch, and in about a year, they hope to support some Galaxy phones. If being a hub is one of your selling points, that’s a very underwhelming, limited list.
Love my Newdery batt case on my s20fe. 2 full charges, charge slow all night for both. Extra in case I game or use a lot, and my battery will last longer.
Why do so many western start ups come up with ways to make something simple complicated? This gives me lots of juicero vibes.
Juicero was an attempt at replicating the printer (or Razor and blades) model for juice, that’s why.
Merkur 23C, btw, in case anyone is looking for a safety razor that’s both inexpensive and very good. Unchanged for literally a century now, no fancy materials (“aerospace-grade aluminium”) but good ole chromed zinc and brass. On the blade side, Russians being out of the picture, BIC is probably the right choice unlike other western brands they didn’t slouch on quality. Feather is always an option but many consider them too sharp. Also, more expensive. BICs should be somewhere around 15ct a piece. Don’t buy anything of that stuff from Wilkinson or such their offerings in that area seem to only exist to make safety razors look bad.
They failed to consider that you can’t squeeze blades. Maybe they should’ve added some to their bags as juice DRM
I mean a phone case with a removable battery? Yeah that’s cool. Already been done though … a very long time ago.
https://www.wired.com/2011/05/third-rail-case-adds-removable-battery-to-iphone/
But I don’t need a machine to take out the battery and replace it. It’s just something else to take up room on my nightstand and eventually break. I’d bet they somehow figure out a way to make it a subscription service too.
I worked at Apple for a while and I can see a use case for this.
It was a little annoying to have to change your iPhone with the card reader attached (for taking payment and stuff in the shop floor) when it was out of battery. You would have to go upstairs and grab another one off charge, sign in, two factor, and then go downstairs to carry on. Only this one won’t pair with the card reader so you gotta do it again.
If you could just do this like the toaster then time saved would be a lot across a company.
I was thinking the same for a similar use case at my job that would nearly cut the number of phones we own in half, but we don’t need the stupid toaster to remove and replace the battery. I’m a goddamn cripple and can do that myself.
Yeah I had one of those charger cases for my S7
2010s replaceable battery phones: look what they need to mimic fraction of our power.
At least with an external battery pack you don’t have to reboot your phone (which is a minor inconvenience, as a FP5 owner).
2010s?
Laughs in Nokia
fairphones have replaceable batteries and other parts
I’m getting Juicero vibes
Right? This is so stupid
I especially love the sound! This thing is hilarious, can’t wait to read the disaster postmortem in a few years time.
Coming Soon: A subscription model where you pay $10 a month for the ability to use your $450 battery swapper.
And you need a special mandatory app on the phone to use it. It needs all permissions and tracks you. It downloads audio ads and uploads them to the swapper while swapping, so it can play them while you sleep.
App Update: Fitness tracker permissions can now tell when you are sleeping, so the app only plays ads when you are awake and actively looking at your device.
Wow, if only someone could find a way to miniaturize and “reimagine” this technology to put it in the phone itself…
Oh, right.
I thought the thing will lower your phone into the box so that the battery doesn’t take your whole room with it when it eventually explodes during charging…
That’s what my thought was, and that would be way cooler.
I worked as a consultant at a product development firm. One of our clients had us making a kitchen appliance that would take a “pod” of some kind (like Keurig).
Their little ad video that they made before involving us had a little CG video showing the pod floating into the receiver and sliding down into the machine.
When we showed them the prototype, the first question we got is if the pod receiver thing was motorized.
Like…no. You push it down. Takes 1 second.
Anyway replacing a phone battery does not need to be automated.
This doesn’t even replace the phone battery, it changes an external charging case.
We have these in bars etc, they let you rent a charged power bank. This is just that with added complexity.
Pretty sure it’s not changing out the whole case. Besides why would you do that? Plus there’s a pic of the case with a slot on the side the battery slides in and out of.
“There’s no AI of dubious value”
The whole thing is of little to no value. Maybe a good idea for people with physical limitations like bad arthritis where swapping a battery might be difficult, but for the average person it’s tech vaporware waiting to fail.
At which point even the ones who it does help will no longer be able to use it because it probably depends on an online connection for no good reason.
Didn’t even think of that, but true. The device would only work as long as a service provider is willing to support it. Or your subscription runs out.
I’m always shocked by how unimaginative this tech-centric community acts. OK, so this version is silly for YOU. Are you the whole world? Are you the future? Stuff like this is typically a bulky demo unit in need of further development. Fringe case devices are also that - fringe case solutions. This isn’t for the person sitting at home with a dormant phone. This probably has an application in medical and scientific fields where mobility is critical, staying in one device is necessary, avoiding a tangled external battery pack is preferred, and automation prevent human error like not plugging in the dead pack fully kor at all). Could have larger applications for swapping vehicle batteries, as well.
So don’t buy it.
Well, their website pictures and targets only persons sitting at home with a dormant phone, and not some kind of other specialty use
It’d be cheaper to buy a power bank for every person in the house vs this abomination
Marketing =/= Reality!
And those weird products that make common, simple tasks easier (think: 90s-00s infomercial for like jar openers or soda pourers) only ever showed normal, able-bodied people badly performing tasks. Doesn’t change the fact that those were targeted at people with disabilities without singling them out. The shown user is not always the target audience.
Sounds super wasteful… It seems like the bigger the threat of climate change fucking up all of us the bigger the number of CEOs shooting shit into space and shitty “innovative” start-ups being founded
Facts!
I don’t see the use case for phones, and maybe there is for other personal electronics, but something similar for EVs should become the norm.
Basically a range extender when you need it, but it can be removed to save on weight when your trips are within the built-in battery’s range. Such a system could easily be extended to trailers, including their own static or removable batteries, and where the additional axles could be powered so they can contribute regenerative braking.
Having to haul a trailer of some sort would be really annoying for long road trips because of the speed limits towing entails. Not to mention the nightmare it is to find parking with a trailer, and even worse charging that accommodates room for a trailer.
I’ve been road tripping around Europe a few times in my EV, and the car is always done charging before the kids are done on the toilet and we have restocked snacks/coffee/gotten an ice cream. Having a break for every ~2-3h of driving is also extremely nice I found, you arrive much less trashed. It’s actually only annoying when you stop to eat lunch/dinner, because you have to move the car before you’re done eating because it’s finished charging.
Yes, this is my experience with EV too (France)
When doing a long trip I actually enjoy having to stop for recharging. It gives me a 15-20 min break to pee, her some coffee and stretch my legs without having the impression that I’m losing time.
I’m in Australia, so my perspective may be skewed. The trailer would be optional, and I only mentioned it as the system as proposed could be just an extension of the self contained removable battery in a vehicle.
Unless batteries can become tremendously lighter, I see a standardised, swappable EV battery a given as a means to further increase vehicle efficiency. Why lug around hundreds of km of range when the distance between typical charging points is a fraction of that.
So you need to raid Battery Town and Gastown on your road trips while fighting off weirdos on the road? 😀
The fuck? Use a battery pack…
This issue has been solved for years.
