SKS Compit+ Smartphone Holder with +Com/Unit Wireless Charging Station

The SKS Compit+ Smartphone Holder with +Com/Unit Wireless Charging Station lets you power your wireless-charging phone with no cables for all-day navigation. Holding your phone/device securely, modular and expandable, it's pretty good, though it does have a few annoying foibles.

• Pros: Part of the excellent SKS Compit modular ecosystem, QI wireless charging, NFC-enabled, can charge other things via USB, can use as generic battery pack for non-bike use
• Cons: Takes 7 hours to charge, erratic charging display indication, need to restart wireless charging if phone removed, input and output current mislabelled

Large displays, waterproofness, GPS, better apps and ever-growing battery life are all reasons why cycle navigating by phone is now pretty much mainstream. Why faff about with a £500 Garmin when your phone can do the job with far less mucking about with GPX files and whatnot? Apps such as Viewranger, Komoot and Google Maps are making on-phone on-the-fly route planning and following dead easy in cities or the countryside. But how do you keep the juice topped up?

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SKS has answered that question with its Compit+ ecosystem of mounts, phone cases and now a battery pack that can charge your phone wirelessly using the ubiquitous QI standard, as well as charging other things by USB cable.

We reviewed the underlying Compit mount and smartphone case here so head over there for the lowdown on the mount and case. The Wireless Charging Station (let's run with 'WCS' from now on) is the bit that clips in between the mount and your phone, doubling its battery life and letting you power other USB things like lights or a GPS computer. It's this battery that's the focus of this review.

It's available by itself for £59.99 if you already have the mount, or with the mount pack as priced above. The phone case is extra.

Battery basics

Measuring 13 x 7 x 2cm, it's about phone size and a bit thicker, weighing 194g by itself, about the same as an iPhone XS. On one side is a male Compit quarter-turn mount, on the other side a female mount – so you can see how it fits in between the bar mount and smartphone case.

On the female side there are two metal contacts that allow the WCS to be charged through the mount, which in turn gets its power from an e-bike head unit USB port. So if your bike is USB-equipped, you can keep both your phone and the WCS 100 per cent charged as you ride along.

The e-bike version with the USB cable comes with a specific mount that you attach the e-bike head unit to, but it's restricted to Bosch Intuvia or Nyon head units. SKS has yet to announce if it will sell a generic version that includes a USB cable that could be wired to a dynamo hub or other e-bike head units.

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The WCS is a 5,000mAh battery. I measured around 4,900mAh input power over repeated charge-discharge cycles – but what's on the tin doesn't equal what you get to use. When you use a USB battery pack there's energy lost in both charging and discharging, as the internal cells are 3.7V but USB is 5V. Also, wireless charging isn't 100 per cent efficient, so the conversion to and from wastes power. This means that 5,000mAh on the SKS tin actually gives you a usable 2,625mAh inside your phone. If, like me, you run an iPhone XS, that's pretty much exactly the installed battery capacity. So a fully charged WCS will double your phone's run-time.

You can improve this a bit by charging your phone using a USB cable (optional extra from SKS or BYO) but the additional win isn't that much. Using the USB port you'll get 3,450mAh of usable juice out.

The input and output currents are both labelled as 2A, but I could never get them to run at more than 1A – no matter what charger, or charged device I was using.

On the WCS there's a four-bar orange LED row showing charge states from 25 to 100%. The 100% one is pretty useless, as it's literally 100% – the moment you use any power it goes out. It takes about seven hours to charge from flat, with the scrolling charging indicators not representing a true reflection of the charged state. A few times I left it charging overnight, with the bars still scrolling from 50 to 100%; when unplugged and replugged in in the morning it then jumped to 100% and stayed there.

Power to your phone

Charging my iPhone XS wirelessly from flat took three hours, with pretty much a 1-1 transfer of power from WCS to phone. As a non-bikey aside, I used it on a business trip as a battery bank and found the ability to keep the phone clipped to it really handy – no dangling cable and separate battery to faff with.

The WCS is IP54-rated, meaning it'll handle dust and splashing water ('rain') and the USB ports have snug rubber covers over them – in fact a bit too snug, as you'll never get them open with gloves on. USB is unlikely to give you issues if it gets a bit damp, and you can always orientate the WCS to keep the ports out of the weather.

There's a single black button, which turns the WCS on with a brief press and off with a long press. Once on, the bars illuminate, showing the battery level, and if you don't attach a phone or plug in a USB device the WCS shuts down after 30 seconds. The blue wireless charging LED goes out if no wireless device is connected, to save power while USB-only is in use.

If you are wirelessly charging your phone and remove it – say, to take a photo – you have 30 seconds to click it back on, or the WCS turns off wireless charging. You need to manually re-enable charging by pressing the button, which I forgot to do on more than one occasion.

You can charge wirelessly with your phone in either orientation – aligned with the WCS, or at right-angles to it.

It's the same deal for the USB port – it's on by default for about two minutes, after which it turns off and you need to enable with a button press. If you subsequently remove a device for more than two minutes you need to re-enable it with a push of the button.

Charge!

SKS has done a pretty good job of predicting use cases here, and you are able to charge the WCS, while charging a phone wirelessly AND charging other things via the USB port. All The Chargings, if you like.

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There's an NFC (near-field communication) chip in the WCS, and if you have an NFC-enabled phone there's functionality that can be enabled using apps that can automate tasks. I was able to set up my phone to open the Viewranger mapping app when replacing the phone on the WCS after taking a photo, for example. With FaceUnlock it was possible to have the phone do this with no touching the screen at all – very handy for winter rides wearing multiple layers of gloves.

Out on a number of long gravel rides through forestry I had the Viewranger app running full-time, showing me upcoming turns and distances. I also had an Exposure Joystick light running in daytime flash mode, charging off the USB port. As you'd expect, after a few hours the battery capacity had decreased commensurate with the drain from the light as it used its own battery and charged up, and the phone doing the navigation as well as its own 3G data stuff. After two hours' riding, starting with a part-charge, my phone had actually charged itself up to 80 per cent, while running a bright screen, GPS and so on. The WCS was down to about 50 per cent.

Clearly, actual run-times and charge capacity will vary depending on how charged you are at the start and what you're using, but fundamentally the WCS lets you go further than you'd otherwise have done, and if you need serious capacity you could always have a separate battery in a frame bag to charge it up via micro USB. SKS doesn't advise either way, but in theory there's nothing stopping you plugging in a well-regulated 5V USB feed from a dynamo hub to keep things going indefinitely. The WCS acting as the weatherproof wireless charging bridge and storage could be a great solution for touring, assuming your dynamo output is properly regulated to avoid damaging the WCS.

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The SKS Compit+ Wireless Charging Station is a robust, multifunctional device that can form the heart of your on-bike power system. There are a few niggles and things to be aware of, but overall it's a good solution to the perennial problem of how to keep juiced up on the go.

Verdict

Good way to carry and charge a wireless-charging-enabled phone, while navigating