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‘Toaster’ dual-iPhone charging dock appears on Kickstarter

The Foaster is a new novel charging dock for your iPhone and the creators are currently running a Kickstarter to put this neat dock into production. As you can tell from the video, the novelty here is the fact it resembles a toaster. The creators say that the kitchen is one of the most common places where people charge their phones, so they thought they would design a dock to suit.

However, there’s no reason that this funky accessory can’t be located in other rooms. It will fit in quite easily elsewhere as a novelty item. The gimmicky design — surprisingly — does have some functional advantages: the dock can charge two iPhones simultaneously and can be operated with a single hand. The lenient design of the enclosure also means that the dock is quite flexible and supports any iPhone equipped with a Lightning port (i.e. the iPhone 5, the 5s and the 5c). The company claims it will fit many phone cases as well.

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When docked, the phones screen is partially obscured. Whilst the phone isn’t really operable in this state, important notifications can still be seen at a glance. This is meant as a charging station anyway, so isn’t really that much of a drawback.

One of the beauties of the iPhone’s design is Apple’s insistence that it can be used with one hand. Why then, should it take two hands to charge your phone? foaster’s brilliant design makes it easy to insert your phone into one of the slots to begin charging. The size of the slots has been optimized based on extensive study of dimensions of “bare” iPhones, as well as “standard-sized” cases. (Sorry, Otterboxes and other cases designed to take a bullet probably won’t fit foaster.) Ready to get your phone out? Even if one hand is busy holding a kitten or a chainsaw- all you need is one free hand to easily grab your phone and go! (Please do not attempt to hold both a kitten AND a chainsaw while using foaster. Our testing did not end well.)

The Kickstarter campaign is five days into its thirty day window, with $3,500 dollars so far pledged to the project. The project has a goal of $40,000. If the goal is met, Covena Design expects to ship the Foaster to backers in March of next year.

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Comments

  1. lorensc - 10 years ago

    The Day Maker had a further interesting concept. An iPhone charging toaster with two docks that gently raised a phone if it’s alarm were activated. Beautiful design that made the rounds last year. Sadly, it did not get funded however. http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/05/day-maker-alarm-clock/

  2. Drew Aitchison - 10 years ago

    it would be good if it was more universal, having a crumb tray that u could pull out to change adaptors, like if you had an older iPhone or a android device

  3. Andrew DenHerder - 10 years ago

    Two USB cords exiting this dock, no power adapter?
    I don’t think their claim of “Buh-Bye Cord Spaghetti, Buh-Bye!” is valid.
    If it had one USB or AC cord coming out it would be a serious consumer product. They need to engineer it, not cobble it together.

Author

Avatar for Benjamin Mayo Benjamin Mayo

Benjamin develops iOS apps professionally and covers Apple news and rumors for 9to5Mac. Listen to Benjamin, every week, on the Happy Hour podcast. Check out his personal blog. Message Benjamin over email or Twitter.