Amazon is really good at making it easy to buy stuff online, however it seems the company isn’t all that great at keeping secrets. That’s because yesterday at an Amazon holiday press preview event, among the hundreds of products it was trying to push as we slowly approach peak gifting season, the company had one unannounced product just sitting out on the shelves for anyone to come and take a look at.
Rumours about Samsung’s upcoming Wireless Charger Duo have been making the rounds, especially in advance of the Note9’s launch on August 9, but Amazon seems to have outright confirmed its existence by putting it on display at its event.
Unfortunately, the handful of Amazon employees that were manning the nearby smart home and electronics station didn’t know much about the device, including its price or expected release date. And when I checked out the product tag that was sitting nearby, it was labelled “Samsung Qi Pad (2018)”, which seems like a different product altogether.
In fact, when I tried to look up the product using Amazon’s QR code, it links you to this thing instead, which is a wireless charger from Samsung, but not the one that was on the display.
As for what little info I could glean from the device itself, it seems to have two wireless charging pads that are powered by a single USB-C input in back. And while there isn’t any official branding in front, by flipping the charger over, I found a sticker on the bottom with a big Samsung logo and power specs listing the device’s input at 12 volts at 2.1 amps.
The other small feature is that, hidden beneath the black plastic in front, there are two handy indicator lights that tell you what the pad’s charging status is. Sadly, the charger didn’t seem to be fully operational as I only briefly got it to blink green and send a tiny bit of juice to my Galaxy S8 before the lights went red and it stopped working.
When it comes to that flat charger on the other side of the pad, rumours suggest it’s intended for use with Samsung’s next Gear smartwatch, which is expected to launch at IFA.
So how did this unannounced wireless charger get outed ahead of its official release? My best guess is that someone at Amazon simply grabbed the wrong product and put it on display instead of the Qi Pad that was apparently supposed to be there.
We’ve reached out to Amazon for more information on the device and to ask why it was on display. Reached by Gizmodo, Samsung declined to comment.
While we’re still waiting for more details on the device’s actual pricing and release, at least now we have pretty damn good evidence that Samsung’s rumoured dual-wireless charger is coming.