Swapery might be the next best thing to a phone with a removable battery

Many top smartphones are equipped with fast charging speeds, but what if you can’t afford to wait for a device to top up? Well, one company claims to have a solution.

The Swapery charging station was announced at CES 2024 (h/t: ZDNet), and it claims to be a “world first auto-swappable battery system for smartphones (sic).”

No, the charging station doesn’t actually swap out your phone’s internal battery. Instead, you first attach an external battery pack to your phone, plugging it into your device’s USB-C port. Once the battery pack has been depleted, you need to place your phone on the station and it will automatically swap the depleted pack for one of four fully charged battery packs stored inside it. The company claims that the swapping process takes just seven seconds.

There’s no word on the battery pack’s capacity, but the team asserts that the pack will give users eight to 10 hours of extra charge (i.e. not screen-on time). We’ve asked the team for more info regarding the pack’s capacity, durability (i.e. IP rating, build), and charging time and will update the article if/when they get back to us.

The Swapery website, which has its fair share of typos, also bullishly claims that this approach will “eliminate all the current charging methods.” It’s worth noting, however, that the charging station only swaps out the battery pack. You still need to actually charge your phone’s internal battery if you want the longest endurance possible when paired with the external battery. Fortunately, there’s a USB-C port on the battery pack so you can charge the phone (presumably via those soon-to-be-eliminated “current charging methods”).

There’s no word on Swapery’s price just yet, but a charging solution like this can’t be cheap. We also wouldn’t be surprised if the team charges a premium for these proprietary battery packs. The device is slated for a Q2 2024 release.

We can nevertheless see this being a convenient solution for people who constantly forget to charge their phones before heading out. In fact, this approach vaguely reminds me of phones with removable batteries, which allow you to quickly swap out internal batteries for an immediate full charge. But between today’s fast-charging phones, the undisclosed pricing, and the unknown company itself, you should take a wait-and-see approach with the Swapery.