Peak Design Wireless Kickstand Travel Battery

Peak Design has announced the Wireless Kickstand Travel Battery, a $99.95 accessory built around a 5,000mAh cell in a magnetic aluminum housing with a folding kickstand. Peak Design describes it as the first wireless charger certified to the newest Qi2.3 standard.

The number that matters is 25W, and the condition attached to it. Most batteries this small cannot wirelessly deliver that much power safely; 25W charging has generally required at least 10,000mAh of capacity. Peak Design gets there at half that size by using Qi2.3's protocol, but only while the battery itself is plugged into a USB power source. Running on its own stored charge, the output drops to 15W.

That distinction is the whole product. Plugged in, it behaves like a charging hub that happens to be portable. Unplugged, on a plane or a train, it is a smaller, ordinary power bank. Peak Design is selling the aluminum housing and the kickstand as much as the cell inside it, which is standard practice for a company built on backpacks, not batteries.

It launches alongside a Wireless Charging Station 2-in-1 at the same $99.95, with two simultaneous 25W pads on a die-cast aluminum base, and a $64.95 Dual Slim Charger, a half-inch-thick GaN adapter putting out up to 65W across two USB-C ports. Neither wireless charger ships with a power adapter, which makes the Dual Slim Charger close to mandatory if you want the Kickstand Battery to hit its rated speed. New USB-C UltraStrand cables, from $24.95 to $39.95, round out the range, up to a 240W, 40Gbps option.

CEO Peter Dering frames the collection as a rejection of cheap, disposable chargers. The price tag is the other half of that argument, and it is not subtle about it.