Disclaimer I have no association with this company, am receiving no direct incentive for promoting it, and simply my friend Andrei showed it to me and I wanted to show it to my dear readers. Yes, you!
MicroUSB variant
Lightning variant
The way they work is you have the end plug that goes into the device, and it is retained with a rare earth magnet that holds the small array of connectors pressed together to the adapter module which you plug in your usual charger plug, and connects power to your handheld device.
They are essentially like the connectors on many Macintosh laptops, and prevent excessive force on the delicate connector - if you whip the device suddenly out of the reach of the power cable, it comes free and no damage to the power input socket occurs.
I had an Alcatel Pop C7 last year have the teensy, delicate contacts inside its' microusb bend out of alignment and the connection became unreliable. MicroUSB connectors are like tiny versions of the full size ones, and on the socket there is a small plastic tab that holds and isolates the wires from each other and the outer sheath of the connector.
This plastic tab breaks very easily and is only about half a millimetre thick, and the contacts are wires about 25 gauge thickness, and once they lift out of the plastic tab they cannot be put back and eventually will get bent and cause a short or lack of connection, and your handheld is basically now impossible to charge.
The only downside to this type of connection is the exposed contacts, meaning they will need a rubber sealed cover to prevent corrosion or water damage, but seriously, it is way past time that these connections should be the standard for contact connection chargers, in general. [ed: in fact they can be exposed and merely be corrosion resistant contact surfaces, for extra safety a mechanical internal spring could mechanically disengage from the contact from the magnet, with an insulator that moves over them when closed...]
Induction chargers are great, but data transfer methods are less than ideal without wires. Maybe sometime there will be combination NFC data interfaces and induction ports, and connecting a storage device will be possible at very high speed via a very short range connector, or maybe an optical port (but storage devices always need power)...
Well, anyway, if you, like me, have had the sole charging port on a mobile device break, you would understand what is so great about Znaps, and I hope someone reading this will now be able to prevent such damage to their devices as well as when using it for data transfer - no more worrying about when the delicate MicroUSB port will stop working.
I think that for Ligntning connectors this is a bit redundant, being so much more durable, but even still, it seems to me that in general Apple users are more brutal to their devices, and such an accesory could improve the safety of the device in general. Sometimes the device falls because the cable yanks tight and flips it out of your hand, compounding socket damage with it falling on its' side and cracking the screen.
Znaps would reduce this kind of secondary damage as well when using it while charging. I killed that C7's charger port because of keeping it plugged while using it.
Loki was born in Australia, now is wandering Amsterdam again after 9 months in Sofia, Bulgaria. IT generalist, physics theorist, futurist and cyber-agorist.
Loki's life mission is to establish a secure, distributed layer atop the internet, and enable space migration, preferably while living in a beautiful mountain house somewhere with a good woman, and lots of farm animals and gardens, where he can also go hunting and camping.
All images in the above post are either original from me, or taken from Google Image Search, filtered for the right of reuse and modification, and either hotlinked directly, or altered by me
