Netflix’s new prestige sci-fi show is delayed until March 22, 2024. 3 Body Problem was originally scheduled to debut in 2023, before being pushed back to January 2024, and now March. Just as the initial delay was accompanied by a teaser trailer, so too is this one:

3 Body Problem is being adapted by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss (who created HBO's Game of Thrones) alongside screenwriter Alexander Woo. The new trailer gives us our first look at the series’ key “video game,” Three-Body, which involves a nebulous and extremely shiny VR headset. According to John Bradley’s character Jack Rooney, the headset has "no screen... no headphone jack... not even a charging port." Donning the headset transports Rooney to a hyper-realistic world, before he’s swiftly ejected and the trailer ends.

The show's source material is The Three-Body Problem, the first novel in Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth's Past series. Originally released in the mid ’00s in China, it gained international recognition and a Hugo award when Tor Books published an English-language translation in 2014. Netflix’s ill-grammared take on the book was announced in 2020, and stars Benedict Wong, Eiza González and several Game of Thrones alums including Jonathan Pryce and the aforementioned Bradley.

With shipments of its Pocket handheld console finally under control, Analogue is turning its attention to a whole new retro machine. The Analogue 3D aims to be the ultimate Nintendo 64, playing original cartridges on modern 4K displays. I’d love to show it to you, but Analogue is only releasing a teaser image and a few key specs today.

The Analogue 3D is the latest in a line of consoles from the company that emulate retro hardware. All of Analogue’s machines use field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) that are coded to mimic original hardware. Rather than playing ROM files like most software emulators, Analogue consoles play original media — in this case N64 carts — without the downsides that software emulation often brings, such as increased input lag or visual imperfections.

Analogue

Analogue started out with boutique recreations of Neo Geo and NES hardware, before targeting a more casual audience with systems that mimicked the SNES and Genesis. Its most splashy release to date is the Pocket, which emulates a variety of handhelds. There’s also the TurboGrafx-like Analogue Duo, which was announced in 2020 and, after some delays, will apparently ship this year.

That may seem like a disparate group of consoles, but there is one thing that ties them together: they’re all pretty primitive. If you’ve been around a while, you’ll remember consoles being referred to as 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit and so on. A lot of that was marketing, but the hardware of 8-bit systems is broadly less complex to recreate than that of 16-bit systems, and so on. As the first true “64-bit” console on the market, the N64 is by far the most complex system Analogue has tackled to date. Its 64-bit 93.75MHz CPU was wild for a $200 console — even if most developers still wrote 32-bit code for it — and its Silicon Graphics “reality coprocessor” was the stuff of (extremely nerdy) playground legend. They made the T-rex from Jurassic Park with (better versions of) that thing!

Analogue

The Analogue 3D is described as a “reimagining” of Nintendo’s console, and the company is promising 100 percent compatibility with carts from all regions. It will output at 4K resolution with Original Display Modes that target “reference quality recreations” of specific CRTs and PVMs. To translate, that means Analogue is building filters that might, for example, make a modern OLED or LCD display feel more like a dope mid-'90s Sony Trinitron TV. No word on whether they’re baking in a recreation of the weird LG TV with legs I played on for most of the ’00s.

Internals aside, the N64 has a small library of games and a mistake of a controller, but there are some classics in there. On the first-party side, The Legand of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask have both held up to decades of scrutiny, and Mario 64, some camera issues aside, is as fun to play in 2023 as it was in 1996. Then there’s Paper Mario, Mario Kart 64, F-Zero X, Star Fox 64, Super Smash Bros. and countless others. Rare also did some fantastic work on the N64 with the likes of GoldenEye 007, Perfect Dark, Banjo-Kazooie, Diddy Kong Racing and Conker's Bad Fur Day. 

Quality third-party titles were harder to come by, but Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, Mischief Makers, Harvest Moon 64 and the Turok games are all worth checking out. (I personally spent more time playing Horse in an average port of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater than any of these, but there’s no accounting for taste.)

Analogue / 8BitDo

One thing very few people remember fondly is the N64’s three-paddled controller, which at the time felt fine but boy was it not. The Analogue 3D will have four controller ports, just like the original N64, but it thankfully also supports Bluetooth and 2.4G wireless connectivity. 8BitDo will be releasing a companion controller for the console, which is all-but invisible in the picture above. After some toying around in Photoshop, it appears to be very similar to the company’s Ultimate controller, but with C-buttons where the regular face buttons would be, the A+B buttons replacing the right analog stick and a big ol' start button in the middle.

There’s no word yet on price — early Analogue machines cost a lot, but its more recent efforts have been more palatable. The Analogue Duo, which has a CD drive inside, cost $250 when pre-orders went live, so it seems a fair guess to say it’d be in the same price range — though you’ll need to budget for a couple of controllers no matter the price, as Analogue doesn't supply them with any of its systems.

The Analogue 3D is currently slated to ship in 2024, and knowing Analogue, pre-orders will open some time in the next few months and sell out almost immediately.

A beetle protagonist emerges into a beautiful, lonely world. There’s no preamble, no text overlays; not even a hint of what you’re meant to do next. So, you walk. After finding your way to a small staircase, you descend, and the steps disappear into the ground — a silent cue that you’re on the right path. A few paces further, you discover a purple pad, and as you stand on it, your iridescent wings begin to quiver. Without thinking about it, you press a button on your controller, the pad turns green, and a nearby rock transforms into a new staircase. Progress!

After solving a couple of rudimentary puzzles, you’ll encounter an orb — these are the heart (and the body) of this game. You carry them on your beetle back, initially using them as keys to open doors and solve puzzles, before discovering that inside every orb is a new world of puzzles and challenges to overcome.

Cocoon is the first game from Geometric Interactive, a studio founded in 2016 by Jeppe Carlsen and Jakob Schmid. Both are alums of Playdead, the Danish studio behind Limbo and Inside, for which Carlsen worked as lead gameplay designer. If you’ve played either of those games, Cocoon’s quietly impressive intro may sound familiar. Both were side-scrolling puzzle-platformers that used their environments and challenges to simultaneously tell a story and guide their players. The story is much the same here, but Cocoon’s structure of layered, interconnected worlds showcases another level of maturity and artistry.

The game actually opens inside the orange orb, a gorgeous desert world, and expands out from there. Each world is protected by a guardian, which needs to be defeated in order to fully unlock the orb’s power outside of that world. Unlocking the orange orb, for example, allows you to walk on hidden paths while carrying it. Each orb grants its own powers, and all are critical to progression.

Annapurna Interactive

The guardians are the game’s “boss fights.” Though there is no traditional combat, each guardian is certainly combative, and there is a degree of skill and timing required to best them. One of the later encounters did actually trip me up a few times, which is as good a time as any to mention that Cocoon has absolutely no fail state. Getting tagged by a guardian doesn’t hurt, they merely throw you outside of their orb — hop back in and you’ll return to the encounter within a couple of seconds. Likewise, you can’t mess a puzzle up to the point that you need to reload.

In isolation, the guardians are probably the game’s weakest moments, but they do provide a nice break from the puzzle-solving alongside a bit of visual spectacle. This is broadly a beautiful game to see and hear, full of bright pastel hues and beds of synth pads, and in places it’s surprisingly gross. What starts as a tranquil walk through something approximating the American Southwest quickly devolves into goopy bio-horror, and I’m very here for it. I started playing the game on a little Ayaneo handheld PC, but about quarter-way through moved over to the Xbox — while it’s a fun thing to play on a portable, the art and sound design really does benefit from a big screen and some decent speakers or headphones.

I think the bigger screen actually helped me — though this is more a review of my eyesight than the game — solve puzzles faster. Toward the end of the game, you’ll find yourself truly disoriented as you jump in and out of worlds and portals, twisting the game’s logic on its head to progress. I feel like I would’ve missed some of the environmental cues — again, my old eyes — had I been playing on a 6-inch screen.

Annapurna Interactive

I only truly got stuck once, when I spent an hour wandering around, trying to figure out what exactly I had to do to solve a puzzle. (The answer, as you’d expect, was blindingly obvious.) Cocoon doesn’t hold your hand, but it is a helicopter parent — in a good way! — gently hovering over you and pushing you in the right direction. There are environmental cues scattered around, and you’ll notice throughout that gates shut behind you at key moments. This prevented me from trying to double-back to see if I’d missed something, an activity that represents half of my playtime in similar games. Subtly locking you in an environment is the game’s way of saying “you have everything needed to progress, so stop being so dense and figure it out.”

Cocoon is a game I can (and will) recommend to anyone that plays video games, and plenty who don’t. Perhaps my only complaint is that I want more. The game only actually introduces, to my count, six core mechanics, and each of those are mixed, matched and remixed in truly creative ways. I appreciate a game being as long as its developer wants it to be, but the bones here are so good, so satisfying, that I can’t help feeling it can hold up to more orbs, more puzzles.

That said, the seven hours or so I spent with Cocoon are among the most memorable of this decade, and I’ll definitely be returning to it in a couple of years, once my brain has purged all of the answers to its puzzles. It’s out today on PC, Switch, PlayStation and Xbox, and if you have Game Pass, it’s included in that subscription.

Cocoon is a game that makes perfect sense while you're playing it. That would be an unremarkable achievement if it wasn't also a game that forces you to use its levels to solve themselves. At Summer Game Fest 2023 I had around half an hour to play through the game’s opening, and it has stuck with me more than anything else I saw at the show.

Cocoon is the debut game from Geometric Interactive, a studio founded by former Playdead employees Jeppe Carlsen and Jakob Schmid. Carlsen was the lead gameplay designer of the award-winning puzzle platformers Limbo and Inside, and Schmid the audio programmer of Inside. The pair also collaborated on 140, a minimalistic indie platformer, and have been working on Cocoon with a small team in Denmark for over five years.

As in Limbo, Inside and 140, controls and interactivity in general are pared back to a minimum. On an Xbox controller, that means movement with an analog stick and interactions confined to a single button. The complexity comes from the environment, the narrative from exploration. It’s reminiscent of Tunic or Hyper Light Drifter in its lack of dialogue and tutorials.

Orbs are everything in Cocoon. They're assets that open doors, trigger switches, reveal hidden paths and solve puzzles, but they’re also levels themselves. Remember that scene in Men In Black where there’s an entire galaxy in a little marble on a cat's collar? Geometric Interactive has taken that idea and made it a core mechanic. Each orb is a distinct world with its own vibe, original puzzle mechanics and a boss fight. You can hop in and out of these worlds by placing an orb into sockets dotted around the game, and can even bring orbs into other orbs, which, given the abilities they unlock, will likely be critical to finding paths forward.

I say there’s a “boss fight” in every orb, but there is no conventional combat in Cocoon – there is just a single interaction button, after all. You defeat bosses by using something in the environment like a water spout or an exploding mine. These fights are also forgiving: I took a “hit” once, and it revealed a delightful mechanic: Instead of dealing damage or killing me, the boss booted me out of its world. I then had to traverse back to the fight to finish it off. Defeating the two bosses I found granted new powers of sorts, in classic Metroidvania style, which allowed progression to new areas and the discovery of more orbs.

There were other simple environmental puzzles to solve. One involved ascertaining the order in which to hit some switches, another had me pulling towers around to open a door. A slightly trickier one involved some doubling back to navigate a hidden path. Given this was the very start of the game, I’m sure the complexity will ramp up significantly. By the end of my playthrough, I was already jumping in and out of worlds in order to get orbs to where they needed to be. 

A colleague who was watching my demo said that they could tell I’ve "played a lot of these types of games” — thing is, I haven’t. Cocoon is a game where everything makes sense, but you can’t explain why. I'm sure, as in other puzzle adventures, I'll get stumped in some places, but exploring this world felt completely natural. After a while I stopped being surprised that everything I tried just worked. Solving puzzles became a flow state as I giddily wandered around carrying my precious orbs.

Cocoon is firmly at the top of my wishlist already, and it’s tough imagining anything overtaking it. It’s being published by Annapurna Interactive, and will come to Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation and Xbox consoles later this year.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest right here!

"Basically, we're not planning a distinct sequel at all."

Dan Greenawalt, GM of the Forza series, has been working on Motorsport games for two decades, but his remarks in a post-Xbox Showcase briefing on Sunday suggest this next release could be the last in the series. Forza Motorsport is the eighth title in Turn 10 Studios' driving sim franchise, and the first new entry in almost half a decade.

Forza has been one of Microsoft’s most reliable first-party properties. Ignoring Playground Games' spinoff Horizon series, the original Xbox had one Forza title, the Xbox 360 had three, and the Xbox One had three. Barring a few launch hiccups, every title has been well-reviewed and the franchise as a whole has sold millions. We’re now in the third year of this console generation, and there’s been no Motorsport game for fans to play.

A lot’s changed since Forza Motorsport 7 arrived in September 2017. The “day one with Game Pass” paradigm shift started with Sea Of Thieves in 2018, and has since become Microsoft’s entire business model. Now, Microsoft measures success more like a social network (or a tech news publication), focusing on monthly active users and playtime, rather than sales.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Forza Motorsport is set up more like a service game than a traditional AAA title.

While many of the modes that Forza players expect, especially the online multiplayer component, are being reworked and improved, Turn 10 is betting that its new career mode will keep players coming back week after week. At Summer Game Fest, the game’s creative director Chris Esaki talked a group of journalists through this new career-mode loop and the shift in philosophy for the series.

Esaki described Forza Horizon as “a whole new take on falling in love with cars.” We saw a career mode event called the Builders Cup, which began with a narrated showcase of a trio of cars. After picking one to roll with, you then head into “open practice,” where you get to know the car. These sessions are packed full of stats and challenges; you earn Car Experience Points (CXP) for every corner you take, and the closer to perfection you are the more CXP you’ll get. CXP is specific to each car, and is used to upgrade parts and customize vehicle performance.

After open practice, you head into a race, where there’s a new “challenge the grid” system that lets you essentially bet against your racing talent. You choose where on the grid to start and how fast your AI opponents are, with higher rewards as the difficulty scales up. After competing in the race itself, you’ll earn money for new vehicles as well as more of the car-specific CXP. Then it’s onto the next open practice, more tuning and customization, and more races.

Esaki calls this loop “level, build, dominate.” He sees it as a way to get players interested in a broad swathe of cars, rather than having them head straight to a Ferrari or Bugatti. That might sound like the ethos of another popular racing sim, but while there are definitely elements of Gran Turismo 7’s cups and café challenges in here, the Builders Cup feels both more contained and more repeatable. It’s all by design: Similar to recent Forza Horizon games, players can expect a big content update monthly, which then rolls out week-by-week.

We’ll likely hear much more about Forza Motorsport in the lead up to its release on October 10th, and I’m interested to try out the new simulation features, like a massively overhauled physics system and improved opponent AI. For now, though, the pitch seems solid. I’m a huge fan of Gran Turismo 7, but if you don’t enjoy online sim racing and the toxicity that comes with it, its single-player experience is fairly threadbare. In contrast, Turn 10 seems to have developed Forza Motorsport as a game that will last forever, with new experiences every week designed to satiate gamers’ desire for fresh races and Microsoft’s desire for monthly active users.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest right here!

Razer is upgrading its Kishi mobile gaming grip for 2022.

The Razer Kishi V2 is redesigned around a more-solid sliding bridge, which will allow for wider device compatibility compared to the original pad's flexible bridge. The rubber inserts that hold your phone snug can also be removed, which Razer helpfully says will support "some phones with phone cases." Good luck figuring out if that includes yours.

While the main inputs look unchanged, the V2's switches — the things underneath the buttons that actually register that you're pressing them — have also been reworked, swapping out membranes for the microswitches found in Razer's Wolverine console pad. There are also tweaks to the function keys, with a dedicated 'Share' button added at the front and a pair of programmable bumpers situated next to the shoulder triggers.

Razer

The Share button will only work with Razer Nexus, the company's new companion app for Android that it hopes you'll launch your games from. Nexus will also help you discover compatible games, stream your gameplay to YouTube or Facebook, tweak controller settings and program those new bumpers. 

As with the original pad, the Kishi V2 connects over USB-C, avoiding the latency of Bluetooth options. The Android version is available today for $99.99, and an iOS version will hit the market this fall. 

At its CES press conference today, NVIDIA teased a new flagship GPU: the RTX 3090 Ti. It says more details will arrive soon, but handed out a few specs to tide its fans over until then.

As a refresher, NVIDIA currently has the RTX 3090 at the top of its stack, with the RTX 3080 Ti close behind and the RTX 3080 as the mainstream flagship. All three are based on the same GA102 chip, with the number of active cores, clock speeds and memory configurations being the key differentiators. The RTX 3090 Ti will usurp the 3090 as the ultra high-end GPU outside of its creator line.

Like the 3090, the 3090 Ti will have 24GB of GDDR6X memory, except it’ll be running at 21Gbit/s, as opposed to the 19.5Gbit/s of the 3090’s memory. NVIDIA also says the GPU is capable of calculating 40 shader teraflops, 78 RT teraflops and 320 tensor (AI) teraflops That compares to the 3090’s 35.6 shader teraflops, 69.5 RT teraflops and 285 tensor teraflops.

Those figures represent a 12.5-ish percent increase over the 3090 across the board, and will likely make the 3090 Ti the most powerful gaming card ever released. We won’t know exactly how NVIDIA has achieved this until it shares full specs, but we can make some educated guesses. 

The 3090 only has 82 out of the GA102’s 84 streaming multiprocessors activated, so it’s likely the 3090 Ti has all 84 running. Then, in addition to the memory clocks being a little faster, it’s likely NVIDIA has elevated the main GPU clock speeds slightly. Some napkin math suggests the boost clock will need to be at around 1,850MHz on the 3090 Ti (compared to 1,695MHz on the 3090) to reach the 40-teraflop figure NVIDIA has provided.

NVIDIA says “more details will be coming later this month,” so we’d expect a small event focused on the 3090 Ti to be announced soon, where we’ll find out how exorbitantly priced the 3090 Ti will be – remember that the 3090 itself has an RRP of $1,500 – and when people will theoretically be able to buy one.

NVIDIA

Also announced at CES is the RTX 3050, which is set to become the cheapest 30-series desktop GPU to date. NVIDIA hasn’t given us full specifications on this one either, but it has 8GB of GDDR6 memory, and will be able to calculate 9 shader teraflops, 18 RT teraflops and 73 tensor teraflops. NVIDIA says it’ll be able to power “the latest ray-traced games at over 60 frames per second,” which is probably true if factoring in the company’s DLSS upscaling tech.

As is usually the case with lower-end cards, there won’t be a “founders” edition sold directly by NVIDIA, but the RTX 3050 will go on sale through the company’s various hardware partners on January 27th, with an RRP of $250.

Follow all of the latest news from CES 2022 right here!

Companies like Razer, Alienware and Asus ROG have been offering laptops with RTX 3080 and 3070 GPUs inside for a while now, but over the summer NVIDIA launched a pair of upgraded desktop cards: the 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti. Now, the company is bringing the “Ti” brand over to laptops.

The 3080 Ti will be available in laptops priced $2,499 and above. NVIDIA says it’s faster than last generation’s Titan RTX desktop card, and will be able to play (unspecified) games with 1440p ultra settings at over 120 fps. It also features 16GB of GDDR6 clocked at “the fastest ever seen in a laptop.” Exact details beyond that haven’t been shared yet, but the first 3080 Ti laptops will be available in February, so we won’t have long till we find out exactly what they’re capable of.

The 3070 Ti will be available in laptops priced $1,499 and above. NVIDIA says this one is “70 percent faster than the RTX 2070 Super laptops,” which isn’t a particularly helpful figure but hey-ho. It’ll apparently be able to run 1440p games at ultra settings at 100 fps, and, again, will start appearing in laptops in February.

Finally, NVIDIA announced some new technologies for Max-Q laptops, including an AI CPU Optimizer which can control the frequencies and power draw of certain Intel and AMD "nex-gen" CPUs, Rapid Core Scaling which can turn off some GPU cores while boosting the frequencies of others for productivity tasks, and Battery Boost 2.0, which will tune both your game and your hardware to apparently improve gaming while on battery. NVIDIA claims that last one can increase your battery life by 70-percent, presumably at the expense of in-game performance.and fidelity.

Follow all of the latest news from CES 2022 right here!

For basically the entire modern history of esports, 1080p has been the sweet spot for competitive gaming. The wisdom goes that a 1920 x 1080 pixel grid gives enough clarity to follow all of the gameplay, while also being light enough that the GPU can process hundreds of frames per second, giving a competitive advantage (or, at least, leveling the playing field).

GPUs today have outgrown 1080p in a big way, though, with flagship cards being able to pump out framerates way above the peak of monitor refresh rates in certain titles. Valorant, for example, can be played at High settings well in excess of 500 fps on NVIDIA’s latest and greatest, while older titles like CS:GO hit over 700 fps.

NVIDIA says that an RTX 3080 paired with an Intel i9-12900K can play Valorant, CS:GO, Overwatch and Rainbow Six Seige in excess of 360 fps at 1440p. With that in mind, the company thinks the time is right for the leap beyond 1080p.

Obviously NVIDIA is motivated by the need to convince gamers to buy expensive GPUs, but apparently there’s a competitive benefit to playing at higher resolution. NVIDIA's own researchers found that a 27-inch 1440p display can improve aiming “by up to 3 percent” over the 24-inch 1080p sets used by current pros.

This new “1440p esports category” begins with four NVIDIA-certified displays: the ASUS ROG Swift 360Hz PG27AQN, the AOC AG274QGM - AGON PRO Mini LED, the MSI MEG 271Q Mini LED and the ViewSonic XG272G-2K Mini LED. The ASUS set is a 360Hz monitor, while the others feature Mini LED backlights but cap out at 300Hz.

All four monitors support G-Sync adaptive refresh rates, an “Esports Vibrance” color mode and, more importantly for the target audience, support NVIDIA’s Reflex latency analyzer. Intriguingly, the new monitors also come with a “1080p mode,” which blanks out the outer edges of the screen to provide a 25-inch 1080p “display” for gaming. There must be some clever scaling going on here, as a 1:1 1080p rendering on a 27-inch 1440p monitor would be a 21-ish inch image. Either way, this mode would be vital for some games – newer esports titles can be more graphically intense than the stalwarts, and playing at 1440p could sacrifice the sort of refresh rates esports pros want for competitive play.

There’s no word on pricing yet, although don’t expect them to be remotely affordable for the average gamer. As for when they’ll be available, NVIDIA has only given out the vague “soon.”

Follow all of the latest news from CES 2022 right here!

In the space of a few years, we’ve gone from 5W USB adapters being the norm, to iPads and Nintendo Switches being able to charge at 18W, all the way up to modern laptops drawing up to 140W. This explosion in charging rates over a (somewhat) standardized USB-C connector has been great for consumers who can now mostly charge their stuff with one or two well-positioned adapters. But, it’s made choosing the right power bank to keep all of your devices topped up on the go way more difficult.

Enter Elecjet, a small company which has been carving out a niche for itself by using graphene in adapters and power banks. It launched its first “graphene-enhanced battery power bank,” on Indiegogo back in 2019, and is now back with the Elecjet Apollo Ultra. It’s a 37Wh (10,000mAh) power bank with a couple of notable specs: It can be charged at 100W, and can output at up to 87W across its two ports.

These numbers are very high. On the output side, most 10,000mAh battery packs top out at around 18W; it’s only chunkier chargers that reach figures like 65W. On the input side of things, you’re looking at around 30W as the peak for a high-end portable charger. (There is a market for “laptop power stations,” which can meet and in some cases best Elecjet’s input and output numbers, but those are typically bulky units.)

My personal power bank at the moment is a 20,000mAh Anker PowerCore, which maxes out at around 25W output and 30W input. Although it’s double the capacity of the graphene model, after about a month of using a pre-production unit Elecjet sent me, I don’t want to go back.

Before I get into that, what does a “graphene-enhanced battery” even mean? Elecjet takes the lithium cells that are inside every device nowadays, and plays with the chemistry. Its “composite graphene cells,” mix a graphene solution in with the lithium in the cathode, and then add some layers of graphene coating the anode.

What you get from this sprinkling of graphene is much improved performance at the expense of size. Thanks to offering lower resistance and higher thermal conductivity, Elecjet’s graphene-lithium composite cells can theoretically be charged five times faster, and run through five times more charge cycles, but are about 25 percent less energy dense than regular lithium. So, composite graphene batteries are faster and run cooler, but will either have a lower capacity or a larger size when compared to the batteries we’re used to.

I’m not really close to pushing the Apollo Ultra to its stated 87W limit. The devices I need to charge on the regular are an iPhone 12, a Nintendo Switch and an M1 MacBook Air. It happily charges my Nintendo Switch at 18W, my iPhone at 20W, and my MacBook Air at around 45W.

That last figure is actually higher than the charger that came with the MacBook Air, but on plugging in a 65W Apple charger from a MacBook Pro, I saw essentially the same figure, so it appears that’s a safe rate for the battery. I did run some tests on a friend’s 13-inch MacBook Pro, though, and found it was able to charge it at a similar speed to the 65W charger that device came with, so I have no reason to doubt the output claims.

Speaking of claims, this is nitpicking to the extreme, but the Apollo Ultra’s USB-C port outputs at up to 65W, and its USB-A port can handle 18W. With the PPS power spec it can output at 68.25W, but none of these combinations add up to the claimed 87W output figure.

Output aside, the main benefit for me is how fast you can charge the battery itself. I’m quite forgetful, and will often be getting ready to leave the house with my phone on low battery, and then go to pick up my power bank only to find out it’s empty. I’m sure that’ll still happen, because if I haven’t learned in 36 years to prepare for life adequately I’m not about to change now. But being able to charge the Apollo Ultra so quickly has meant it’s really not an issue. Plugging it in for about 6-7 minutes gives me enough juice to charge my iPhone from the red up to 100 percent, and honestly even a couple of minutes before I run out of the door has got me home without my phone dying on me. Although the pre-production units are limited to 87W input (and so took about 35 minutes to charge), the final, 100W edition will charge from 0 to full in under half an hour. It’s like a safety net for my own stupidity.

Its small size, at least in comparison to my regular power bank, is also a plus. At 130 x 68mm, Elecjet’s bank has roughly the same footprint as an iPhone 13 mini, and it’s about 17mm thick. It’s totally pocketable for most folks, or at the least jacket-pocketable, which is not something I can say about my Anker. It’s also, in my opinion, pretty attractive for a power bank, with nice quality white and black plastics, and a proper display that shows the battery percentage. After years of divining how much power is left with four little LEDs, having so many degrees of precision is very nice.

For everything I love about its size and build quality, there’s no getting around the fact that the Apollo Ultra’s overall capacity is quite low. It can handle about two thirds of a MacBook Air’s charge, two and a bit Switch charges, or three-ish charges of a modern smartphone. That’s… absolutely fine. But the benefits of being able to charge something at 65W are somewhat limited when the battery drains in 35 minutes at that rate.

What I really want is impossible with today’s tech: Something this size, just as performant, but double the capacity. In the future, Elecjet says it will be able to make the power module smaller to mitigate the density issue, and it also claims it has “ a new battery under the wraps” that can get far closer to the density of regular cells.

In the meantime, it would be great to see Elecjet expand its current Apollo Ultra range to include larger capacity batteries. Some options would be good, so buyers can pick the compromise that suits them. A 55Wh battery pack would only be 50 percent larger, but handle a wider variety of devices. Even a 75Wh battery would only be double the volume.

Judging the pricing Elecjet has opted for is difficult. The Apollo Ultra is on Indiegogo at $65, which is honestly the most expensive I’ve seen a battery pack of this capacity in recent memory. But it behaves more like the ultra-high end battery packs that go for $100+, and unlike those fits in my jeans pocket. But it doesn’t last as long as those— you see my problem. I think $65 is a reasonable price for what you get here. It’s a sleek, cool-looking thing, and the fast-charging makes it more useful to me than a “regular” larger-capacity battery pack.

As with all Indiegogo products, there’s a big caveat in that you are not buying a product that currently exists. Production will begin shortly, and users backing today should expect their devices in early 2022. I have a working unit on my desk, so I’m confident that Elecjet can deliver a power bank as advertised. But the company’s past Indiegogo campaigns do lead to even more caveats.

Both the Elecjet Apollo and Apollo Max campaigns had issues. A few users reported exploding power banks, others never received their units and, perhaps worst of all, users who complained through the Indiegogo campaigns were left without answers for months or in a couple of cases years. All of the complaints have now been addressed, but only in the past few days leading up to the launch of the new product.

Elecjet merged with another company named Real Graphene earlier this year. Both companies were founded by the same person, Samuel Gong, a UC Berkeley engineering graduate, but Gong says he was not involved in the day-to-day operations of Elecjet until the two merged. When I asked about the complaints surrounding prior campaigns, Gong acknowledged that “there were some issues with the previous products’ quality,” and said most people who didn’t receive their product failed to provide a shipping address through Indiegogo. He said the company “was being managed by another team, and previous campaigns and products were done by [that] team.” He added that the new Apollo Ultra was extensively prototyped and has been evaluated by UL (a well-regarded certification company) for safety. (The press pack Elecjet provided touts “8 safety features” and notes the device never exceeded 42C in testing.)

As for not responding to customer support requests, he acknowledged that, after the merger, the company “couldn’t dedicate enough time to previous campaigns.” The reason he gave for the sudden responses to old complaints was that a new team has been hired to manage the Indiegogo campaign, and that team is also aiding backers of old projects from before the new leadership team was around.

I’m extremely into the Elecjet Apollo Ultra. It’s rare that I’m interested, let alone excited, about a product as dull as a power bank, but it’s always good to see something totally new enter any tech space. Those caveats are certainly worrying, though. If you’re not willing to take the risk but are still interested, Elecjet does have its own retail site, and a sizable Amazon presence, for its other products. You could always wait for the product to launch and hit more traditional retail channels (at a slightly inflated price) further down the line.