Immediately I discovered they make delightfully retro cassette tape energy banks

As a ‘90s child who dreamed of being an ‘80s grownup, this instantly commanded my consideration: now you can cost your cellphone with a cassette tape.

Shenzhen equipment producer Remax has apparently been on it for over a yr, debuting “10,000mAh” batteries that appear like basic cassettes. Relying on the colour — yellow, purple, or the brand new inexperienced 2023 mannequin — you possibly can cost them up with USB-C, micro-USB, and even an Apple Lightning cable, then output as much as 22.5W over USB-A or USB-C to fast-charge a cellphone.

The $20-$40 batteries aren’t fairly as nifty as I initially imagined. Whereas they do awesomely include their very own clear cassette tape instances, they’re positively bigger than a basic cassette, and there’s no spinning components to fiddle with.

The unique yellow and purple fashions additionally don’t have place to place your charging cable — one thing remedied on the brand new inexperienced model, which provides pull-out versatile 20W Kind-C and Lightning cables whereas ditching a weaksauce LED flashlight and the micro-USB enter.

The explanation I’m not immediately plopping down my very own $25: I believe I’ll be upset by their cost. Whereas they could nominally comprise 10,000mAh batteries, the positive print exhibits a “rated capability” of simply 5200mAh, and the purple mannequin, at the least, solely guarantees 300 cost cycles earlier than that capability wanes.

Nonetheless, tremendous cute stocking stuffer, and will most likely be good for one full cost of a single cellphone at a time. I’ll depart you with a quick YouTube hands-on I noticed with final yr’s yellow variant — Paul right here was fairly impressed with the general really feel.