There are a myriad of ways you can charge your phone publicly, from the airport lounges to those weird lock boxes in convention centres, but I have found a new way of charging: wireless charging on benches.
Mindlessly scrolling on Twitter I saw one of my old bosses post a photo of a public bench on Oxford Street, in Sydney with a wireless charger on the armrest.
Ok so this is cool. The Busstop has a wireless charger pic.twitter.com/P1NJ3HcRlN
— Andrew Birmingham (@BirminghamAg) June 5, 2024
I had never seen something like this, I asked my colleagues if they had seen a similar phenomenon and most people were as stumped as me.
One colleague, however, said she sees the chargers at her local bus stop but never bothers to use them because she thinks they are broken, but will use it next time she pops on the bus. So watch this space for a review.
Doing some additional digging online, I looked up her local council, which is Waverley and wireless chargers, and this has been a thing for the past year.
According to the Waverley Council website, it installed wireless charging stations in April 2023! An entire year of wireless charging goodness.
Now I don’t know how efficient they are or if they somehow steal all your data through the Magsafe connection (a very bad conspiracy, but humour me!).
Parts of Melbourne also have something similar, the Yarra City Council has smart benches. These benches also have wireless charging capabilities and even can give users free Wi-Fi.
The best thing about these benches is they are solar powered you can rest easy knowing you’re not contributing to greenhouse gases while trying to juice your phone up. Also if your phone doesn’t have wireless capabilities, you can bring a cord to charge your phone. Which the more I think about it, doesn’t seem that convenient.
It’s good to see that our cities are adopting fun new convenient technologies to make our commute a little bit more bearable.
Image: Urbanists/iStock