LAS VEGAS — There’re a lot of seemingly brilliant, sexy tech here at CES. razor-precise, slightly annoying miniature flying drones! A case for your iPhone that gives it weird, infra-red Superman eyes!
Wonderful. But would we really end up using this stuff? I mean, yeah, we probably would. But not every day. Probably not every month. On the other hand, TYLT’s Energi 2K — a wall charger with a USB port that also houses a battery — is the kind of brilliant idea that we imagine we’d actually want to use every day.
Simple, and smart: The little brick has fold-up prongs that plug into the wall, turning it into a wall charger. Plug a charging cable into the USB port and it’ll charge a hungry device (though it doesn’t have enough amps to charge an iPad); with no device attached, the battery inside the Energi 2K will charge itself. If you need power on the go, just grab it from the wall.
The Energi 2K comes with a 2200 mAh battery, theoretically more than enough juice to fully charge a depleted iPhone (for power users, there’s also the Energi 3K+, a 3000 mAh battery/wall charger that also comes with an embedded Lightning cable).
ZAGG has a similar device called the Sparq — a possibly interesting circumstance, as TYLT says they’ve received a patent for the Energi series. To make things murkier, there’s no word on pricing or availability for TYLT’s version.