Forgoing a night stand charger is pretty normal when you’re travelling, but Twelve South’s latest accessory means you can take it with you, provided you can swallow the cost.
Keeping an iPhone and Apple Watch charged is easy enough with a stand, and you can typically charge a pair of earphones with it, but it’s not the sort of thing that goes with you on a trip.
It’s not that you can’t travel with a stand, but more that they come with awkward angles that won’t fit into luggage comfortably without snapping. Look at the Belkin BoostCharge 3-in-1 or the Twelve South HiRise 3 Deluxe, and you’ll see these accessories all have plastic and metal coming out at awkward angles that you know won’t survive a trip. There’s just no way.
Instead, that means you’re probably going to be bringing a cable or two with you from the original packaging, covering iPhone, Watch, and so on and so on.
Twelve South could have something for that, though, with a gadget it calls the “ButterFly”.
In what almost feels like a more recent interpretation of Apple’s now-retired MagSafe Duo, the Twelve South ButterFly is a compact circular case that flips open to reveal a MagSafe charger and an Apple Watch charger, the latter of which can flip up to run your Watch on Nightstand mode.
Not much bigger than an AirPods Pro case, ButterFly is definitely compact, looking more like a thick compact mirror of sorts, except designed for iPhone owners.
It only needs its USB-C cable plugged in, and it’ll snap to the back of a recent iPhone using MagSafe, while recharging a Watch. What’s more, the case can also be used as stand of sorts, holding an iPhone up while in landscape mode.
It’s not cheap, however, with the Twelve South ButterFly commanding a $219.99 price tag in Australia. Given that it replaces a handful of cables, you’ll have to judge whether that value is worth the price of admission, though we suspect some folks will be fine with it, particularly if they’re frequent travellers looking for a portable desk stand of sorts.
