Smart gadget keeps your devices from charging themselves to death

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Chargie sits between your iPhone and its charger to protect its battery's lifespan.
Chargie sits between your iPhone and its charger to protect the lifespan of its battery.
Photo: Chargie

This post is brought to you by Chargie.

We know, you hate it when you wake up in the morning and your phone is warm from last night’s charging session (especially in the summer). We also hate it when you miss calls or flights when your phone dies because the battery doesn’t hold up like it used to.

You can easily put an end to this mess with Chargie, brought to you by a guy who one autumn afternoon said, “That’s it!” after almost missing his flight home because of a dying phone battery. Ovidiu Sandru’s device now has over 25,000 customers worldwide and has been protecting phone batteries since May 2019.

Chargie keeps phone batteries from aging

Chargie extends the lifespan of your iPhone's battery.
Chargie extends the lifespan of your iPhone’s battery.
Photo: Chargie

If you know a bit about electric cars, you probably heard that keeping their batteries at 100% overnight reduces lifespan by a lot. That’s why Tesla’s cars avoid charging to 100% by default. The cars say they are fully charged, but they are not.

Chargie is basically a gem of a gadget that controls the charging level of your iPhone’s battery, to greatly prolong its lifespan.

How do I hook it up?

Chargie sits right between your phone charger and the USB cord that attaches to your iPhone or iPad. You don’t have to worry about complex wiring operations — everything is dead simple. Chargie is travel-size and can go everywhere with you.

What about Apple’s Optimized Charging in iOS?

Any iPhone or iPad running iOS 13 or later already has software built-in to optimize charging.

While Apple’s Optimized Charging works in ideal situations, it still charges your battery to 100%, which isn’t great. Plus, it makes your iPhone or iPad wait at 80%, which is still a highly charged state, before topping it off.

The more important issue is that Optimized Charging doesn’t always work. You have to have a very fixed schedule for Optimized Charging to work properly. And from Chargie’s experience and experiments, Optimized Charging seldom does what it says.

On the other hand, Chargie offers manual/semi-automatic control over how and when the battery juices up. You can keep the overnight level at 50% and only top up to a much healthier 90% in the morning. And with Chargie, you can be sure this is going to happen every single night.

At first, when Apple announced Optimized Charging, Chargie’s makers feared the software would kill their device. But exactly the opposite happened. iPhone owners became more aware of the battery-degradation phenomenon. And, as iPhones get more expensive, many want the better solution for their phones — Chargie.

Overnight charging at its best

Chargie is a smart gadget that'll prolong the battery life of your rechargeable devices.
Chargie is a smart gadget that’ll prolong the battery life of your rechargeable devices.
Photo: Chargie

With its own app and Bluetooth connection, Chargie lets you take control of the overnight charging process, by giving you a chance to set the desired level of battery charging (ideally 80%).

The fun and exciting part about this type of charging is that the battery will reach the desired level only close to when you wake up (you tell the app when that is). That way, your phone will not stay at damaging charging levels or heat up during the night. You’ll then have peace of mind in the morning, with your iPhone ready to go, just like nothing special happened.

This means no more missed alarms — and no more stressing out about the life of your phone’s battery. Chargie takes care of everything automatically.

Can I protect my other battery-powered gadgets with it?

Short answer is yes. Chargie can be used to protect Apple Watches, AirPods, headphones and many other battery-powered devices.

The Chargie app has an external battery-profiling function that measures charging power throughout the charging cycle. You can then select a power threshold at which the Chargie device, independent of its app, will automatically cut off the energy going to your battery.

It also will wait for a configurable amount of time until reapplying power to make new measurements. This way, your battery will charge to some 90%, and also will get a chance to discharge for a while. You’ll just forget about it, eventually.

Where can you get it from?

You can order Chargie online at a fair price, starting at $34.99 for Chargie A Gold Edition. For just $1 more, you can pick up the new Chargie C Basic, which limits the power coming out of your charger to just 8W. This slows the charging process by about 20% but is much better for your battery. There will also be a Chargie C for Laptops in the very near future.

Use the coupon code cultofmac22 for a generous 10% discount on the label price (for a limited time only, so hurry up!). Read more about it on the official Chargie website.

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