Portable chargers have become as ubiquitous a smartphone accessory as cases, and rarely do they include any genuine innovation anymore — but the Quarter does. It’s the first backup battery that can be charged using your MacBook’s power adaptor, giving you enough juice to revive a dead iPhone in just 15 minutes.
There’s a certain irony that we all pine for the thinnest, lightest, most feature-packed smartphones, and then have to carry around bulky portable chargers to help keep them powered ’til sunset. At just over 12 millimetres thick, though, the Quarter, hiding a 5000 mAh battery inside its aluminium button-less housing, manages to stay on the sleek and pocket-friendly side of things. That’s enough to fuel your dead iPhone a few times.
The Quarter can be charged using a microUSB connection like nearly every other backup battery you’ll find on the market, but you’ll need a good seven hours to completely replenish it. So if you drain it during the day and forget to recharge it over night, you can forget about being able to rely on it the next day.
And that’s exactly why the Quarter is the first to also include a MagSafe port that’s compatible with both the original and newer versions. Swap your MacBook’s charging cable from your laptop to this battery and it will recover 50 per cent of its capacity — enough to completely revive many smartphones — in just 15 minutes. Leave it plugged in for a half hour more, and the Quarter will be completely recharged.
The creators of the Quarter are accepting pre-orders for the hardware through a site called Pozible, and you can reserve one now for just $US39. The company already has 1000 units in production with an expected delivery of sometime after 15 November, and if you’re one of the first 200 customers they will even throw in free laser engraving. Although, marring that lovely MacBook-inspired aluminium enclosure seems like a crime.