Swippit Hub keeps your iPhone charged with fresh batteries

There’s so much AI-powered crap at CES that it’s quite refreshing to see a very straightforward, classic widget like Swippitt. It’s a breadbox-sized hub that holds five battery packs that fit inside a custom-made iPhone case. When the battery is in the case, it works like a similar product, keeping your phone charged. The trick is, when the battery is dead, you slide your phone into the top of the case and it automatically pops the battery out of the case and puts in a new one.

Keeping our phones charged is definitely an issue, but it’s fair to question whether Swippitt is an over-engineered (or possibly over-priced) solution. For $450, you get the Swippitt hub and five batteries, but you’ll also need to buy a separate $120 case for your iPhone. The team makes cases for the iPhone 14, 15 and 16 series, and is also working on cases for Samsung. If you intend this to be a multi-phone family solution, things can get expensive quickly.

However, there’s something charming about having a little box that can just drop a fully charged battery into your phone’s case in seconds. I wish you could see inside and actually see how the batteries change — maybe we’ll get a see-through model in the future. Naturally, there’s also an app that will let you check the status of all five batteries, whether they’re in the charger or not in use. Parents can even receive alerts when their kids’ phone drops below 15 percent.

Perhaps Swippitt’s biggest challenge is keeping up with the phones, as every year they get slight tweaks and revisions that change their sizes — and, more importantly, their batteries. Phone batteries will certainly continue to get bigger and require more power to recharge, so Swippitt will need to keep an eye on both case design and battery design. It seems like a lot to ask for a small launch, but they’ve already struggled with such changes – Apple’s addition of a dedicated camera button to the iPhone 16 series meant they had to quickly redesign the case.

As for availability, Swippitt says it will start shipping initial orders in April, but expects it to take a few months from there to get up to full speed. And while the $450 price tag is steep, Swippitt is offering 30% off pre-orders in January, plus you can take $100 off the early CES discount until January 17th, which changes the financial equation significantly. If you’re heavy on your phone’s batteries and want to keep it charged without a second thought, this convenience might be worth the price.