Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Wildcharge - Err...what's the point?

I saw this advertised in the Sunday Times Gadget section this week. By the way, I'm not normally a ST reader, but my wife bought it for me knowing that the multiplicity of it's girth would keep me occupied and away from the trauma that is daytime television for a whole week at least!

Anyway, back to this. It's called the "Wildcharge" and apparently it allows you to charge your phone/gadget without plugging it in. It does this by you putting your "gadget" in a thin jacket connecting it via the suitably provided "adapter" and then just resting your gadget on the base plate. Tiny connections then trickle charge through the jacket into you device, so charging your, err, device. However, I see several flaws with this.

  1. It's currently only available for the iPhone/iPod Touch or Blackberry - lucky I have a Palm and an HTC device then.
  2. It's available from Firebox, and whilst Firebox is a site I've used several times in the past for novelty value, several of the "things" I've bought from there haven't lived up to expectation (or the wild claims of the manufacturer/advertiser). It's important to note that some things have lived up to expectation though....I won't go into them all here
  3. It's selling at £59.99 which would buy you an awful lot of proper spare chargers for any device. One for the house, one for the office, one for the car, a spare one etc....
  4. If you've got to plug an "adapter" into your device from the jacket, why not just plug the bloody thing into it's own charge
  5. It's out of stock
  6. Most importantly, why bother? Why not just plug the device into it's charger (they all come with one) and do the job properly?

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