Fishbone Charging Station — Hands-on and giveaway

The crowd funding model is really popular and there are some hugely successful projects out there. There’s also a few ideas that really shouldn’t have made it beyond “hold my beer, I’ve got this idea”. Luckily one of the ideas for those of us who are endowed with plenty of toys, one of the ideas that has progressed well is charging stations. The Alldock was the first of these to really strike it big and now the Fishbone has done the same. A smaller footprint charging dock that will hold and simultaneously charge 5 devices, even higher amperage devices, with its max 7.8 amp output. The project launched in August 2015 and within days had achieved their goals, within a month they were hitting stretch goals also.

Having backed a few projects on both Kickstarter and Indiegogo, I’ve seen some really good and some really bad packaging. Thankfully for the presentation of not only the product but the parent company, the Fishbone falls in the former and a real highlight for me was the quality and presentation of the packaging; simple and functional yet clean and classy.

From there, you need to choose a good place for the dock to make it convenient to use and easy to access. Setting up the Fishbone truly could not be simpler:

1. Grab the appropriate cables for the devices you want to charge – Any USB cable will fit
2. Plug them into the back of the device
3. Use the tracks under the charging station to run the cable to the slots

Once the Fishbone is ready, just pick a slot and charge your devices. I found that it was a little deceptive, because of how small the device is that initially I neglected to allow for the footprint of the devices I was charging. I still have my Nexus 9 which sits well wide of the charging station, I have a phone, my mobile battery which gets charged weekly, my phone and quite often a review device which fills the 5 charging slots on here. That says a lot about the flexibility of the Fishbone, the fact it can cater for something as large as the Nexus (or iPad if thats your thing…) and down to my iPod and mobile battery pack and the small footprint means it can easily fit in amongst home entertainment gear or as a stand alone item on your bedside table (as shown below).

The easy access to cables is an encouragement to “top up” charge your devices rather than simply overnight charge them, which is fantastic as it adds value to the charging station by increasing the battery life of your devices on a daily basis. This comes back to choosing a great spot for your Fishbone to make it accessible and convenient to use.

It’s important to note that a charging station isn’t going to be for everyone, to make it useful you really need to have multiple devices that require charging near daily. A phone, tablet, pocket wifi, smartwatch, kindle or various other review devices but if you do have 2 or more devices that require charging regularly or perhaps your kids have a device or two each you’ll find that the Fishbone will be a really valuable addition to your electronic arsenal.

You’ve got a couple of options to get your hands on one of these:

1. Head to their webpage and order one
2. Comment on this post (keep it clean please) and we’ll choose 2 comments at random to be the lucky recipients of a Fishbone Charging Station.

Tell us in the comments below what you think is the most positive way you’ll be able to utilise the Fishbone and you just might win one (of the two) that we have to give away.