This toaster-looking gadget boosts your phone’s battery in seconds

I didn’t have “phone toaster” on my CES bingo card, but here we are. Swippitt is a unique solution to the problem of keeping your phone battery charged up, and it promises a life where you basically never have to plug your phone into a charger again. But it’ll cost you.

To be clear, there isn’t an actual toaster involved. Swippitt — which rhymes with “whip it,” and I’m sorry you have that song stuck in your head now — includes a system of interchangeable batteries that fit into specially designed phone cases. You use your phone like normal, and the extra battery charges your phone through a power connector integrated into the case — much like plenty of other battery cases on the market.

But instead of having to recharge the external battery, you swap it out. To change the battery out for a new one, you insert your phone, case and all, into the Swippitt Hub, which is the toaster-looking bit. Inside the hub, a fully charged battery is swapped into your case, the old one is retained to recharge, and your phone is ready to go with a fresh external battery. The whole thing happens within seconds. The demo unit I saw was pretty noisy about it all, but I’m told final production models will have much better sound dampening.

Each external battery provides an extra 3,500mAh, which is roughly 50 to 90 percent extra charge, depending on the size of your phone’s battery. That power is available immediately to begin charging your phone, or if you’re topping off a battery that’s not super low, it can sit in reserve until needed. An accompanying app lets you set lots of different parameters — things like limiting the charging of your phone’s battery to 80 percent to extend its lifespan, dictating certain times of day to charge your phone, that kind of thing.

Because it uses a mechanical process to swap external batteries, 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. 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. The company’s CEO and founder Padraic Connolly tells me that they’ve designed it with some wiggle room to keep the hub and batteries all compatible even if phones (groan) continue getting bigger in the coming years.

This all clicked for me when I realized that Swippitt isn’t just selling a silly charging gadget — it’s selling a life where you never have to plug your phone into a charger again. Who wouldn’t want that? But this vision of an untethered future comes at a price: $450 for the hub, which contains five batteries, and a phone case with a battery included is $120. The company is running some introductory promos, including 30 percent off your entire purchase if you order in January, as well as another $100 off as a kind of CES special. Swippitt expects the system to start shipping in June 2025.

Still, you could buy a whole bunch of nice MagSafe chargers for that kind of money. But what Swippitt offers is a tidier solution, one you don’t really have to think about. For some people, that kind of convenience might be worth the price. The rest of us will probably have to keep our phone chargers for now.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge