MagicMount Wall Charger Review

Introduction

Smartphones are supposed to help streamline your life, right? After all, they're your one-stop-shop for everything from managing your schedule, communicating with work contacts, staying in touch with friends and loved ones, and even delivering entertainment. But while these wonderful gadgets may add order to our lives, they can leave behind a path of clutter in their wake.

Your phone itself may be sleek and sophisticated, but the day-to-day of using one also involves a litany of accessories, from earphones, to cases, to selfie sticks, to those ubiquitous chargers. There's a fair chance you've got cables for charging your phone strewn all over your nightstand, your car, your desk, and maybe even have a travel charger in your bag (if not also a full-on backup battery pack).

Is there maybe a better way to power our phones, still taking advantage of efficient, reliable wired charging while doing something about the mess of cords that all too easily permeates our existence? Scosche thinks so, and puts forth its MagicMount Wall Charger as the answer.

Design

The MagicMount is based around a simple enough idea: in order to reduce cord clutter when charging our phones, why not keep the phone as close as possible to the charger itself? And to make that as easy as possible, the MagicMount taps into the power of magnets.

The charger is a straightforward power brick – a bit larger than your typical smartphone charger, but smaller than something like a laptop power supply. It plugs into a grounded outlet and has a single USB port on the bottom, capable of 2.4A output.

So far, there's nothing particularly special here, but the MagicMount Wall Charger's “magic” is hiding just under the surface: the adapter is equipped with some powerful magnets. When paired with a matching MagicPlate – an adhesive panel that secures to the back of your smartphone – you can stick your phone right onto the Wall Charger, where it will remain securely in place.

Setup

The MagicMount Wall Charger comes with two metal plates: a small one for more petite handsets, and a larger one to make sure that even heavier phablets stay securely in place. The 3M auto-grade adhesive on both pads is designed to provide a tight grip while also being removable without causing any lasting damage. But if even that has you feeling a little wary, Scosche also includes a transparent protective film sticker that you can put on your phone first, and then attach the magnetic plate to the film.

There's a lot of flexibility in how you can apply those plates: they'll go directly on a phone themselves, attach to a case, and you can even keep your phone looking neat by placing one on the inside of the case, where it can't be seen. There, though, you run the risk of reduced grip strength, so make sure that the charger's magnets have a good hold of your phone before leaving it there.

Then it's just a matter of plugging the MagicMount into a convenient outlet, hooking up a USB cable, and putting your phone in place. Thanks to the way it holds phones facing forward, you've got a good view of any status LEDs to let you know when charging's done.

Experience

Indeed, the MagicMount Wall Charger does exactly what it sets out to do: it holds your phone to the wall while providing power for charging. And in the right environment, that can get your phone and charging cable off your desk, reducing clutter in the process. So is that it? Well, not really.

Let's start by talking about where Scosche intends you to use this thing. While it will work in any three-prong outlet, a lot of outlets aren't exactly placed in areas where we feel particularly good about leaving our phone: inconveniently tucked behind appliances, or out exposed at shin-level, just asking to be accidentally knocked down. And while extension cords and power strips may place power where we need it, the MagicMount Wall Charger isn't lying about its name: it really is designed solely to be used on a wall.

Maybe the ideal placement, then, is something like an outlet adjacent to a countertop surface – safely up above the floor, and in a situation where there really could be some benefit to freeing up counter space.

But that then brings us to our next problem: the cable. It would make a lot of sense for the MagicMount Wall Charger to ship with a very short USB cable. Maybe you have one just like that already lying around, but the vast majority of cables that ship with phones are of the long, just-asking-to-get-tied-up-in-knots variety. Sadly, you'll find no short cable included with this charger. To an extent, we can understand Scosche's thinking here, wanting to appeal equally to users with micro-USB, USB Type-C, and Lightning-cable phones. Even so, the absence of such an essential part of this charging system is nonetheless frustrating.

The MagicMount Wall Charger is meant to be used with a single device at a time, and has a single USB port to match. And though its 2.4A output puts it up there among the most powerful of traditional USB chargers, we can't help but notice that it lacks support for specific fast-charging tech, like Qualcomm's Quick Charge. Perhaps the logic there is that if you're phone's not cluttering up the counter while charging, you don't care how long it takes to juice up. But it would still be nice to get to enjoy Scosche's interesting accessory without sacrificing more advanced charging tech.

Conclusion

It's easy to look at the MagicMount Wall Charger and say, “this isn't really something I need,” but that would be missing the point. Maybe you're totally happy with the way you currently charge your phone, or don't really seeing a phone sitting on the counter as it charges to be a big inconvenience. But if your home or workspace is arranged in such a manner that there's an obvious spot to use the Wall Charger, and if you really get a lot of pleasure out of the minor organizational task of keeping your phone looking tidy while it charges, we get how this product makes a degree of sense.

But unless you find yourself in the center of that perfect storm, the Wall Charger may not be for you. It requires you to outfit your phone with a magnetic plate (when we'd much rather keep our phones looking all factory fresh), doesn't include the short USB charging cable you'll need, and isn't compatible with popular fast-charging tech.

At least at $30 it's not a very expensive accessory, but unless you really, really dig the way this stands to help organize your living space, this is one charger that's tricky to recommend.