The Best 3-In-1 Charging Stand for iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods

I’ve been onboard the wireless charging train for nearly a decade, and still remember being excited to finally have a device I could try it with when I bought my iPhone 8 in 2017. Wireless charging felt like magic,despite the fact that it was slow and unreliable, that it wasn’t all that unusual to pick up your phone to find it was both way too hot and hadn’t charged at all. We’ve come a long, long way since then.

The most recent innovation is Qi2.2, the latest version of the Wireless Charging Consortium’s MagSafe-based standard that requires chargers to feature a magnetic ring and be capable of outputting up to 25 watts of power to Qi2.2-compatible phones. That’s really good for wireless charging, although without some additional cooling, you can’t expect it to hit that rate for very long, if at all.

Enter the new Anker Prime Wireless Charging Station, one of the first Qi2.2 chargers on the market—and priced like it’s the only one, at $230. At first glance, it’s no different than any other 3-in-1 stand that you can hang iPhones, Apple Watches, and AirPods on for simultaneous charging. Yet there’s more to it than that: it’s got a cooling fan to keep your phone from throttling the charging rate. It also has a touchscreen, so you can check the charging power going to each device. You can also see that same info in an app that lets you tweak settings, set the time (its timeout screen shows a clock), and even update its firmware.

That’s all a lot, but the good news is that the Anker Prime Wireless Charging Station works well, especially when it comes to its big banner feature of fast wireless charging for your smartphone. I confirmed with my partner’s iPhone 16 that this charger can get up to 22.5W, as Apple says it and others in the 16 line can. And my own iPhone 15 Pro, which isn’t explicitly capable of that, still reached about 17W and held it for long-ish stretches. That’s all according to the stand’s own display; there’s not a good way to check it, otherwise. But the end result was a phone that could fully charge nearly as fast as when I charged with USB-C, yet was still cool—and sometimes cold—to the touch when I pulled it off the charging pad.

These sorts of charging stands—the kind with two stalks, one for a phone and one for an Apple Watch and a wireless charging pad for AirPods—aren’t usually pretty, but Anker sure tried! It’s sturdy and weighty, and the company used soft touch materials for the base and magnetic pad for iPhone charging. Its stalks are encased in shiny, reflective metal, the base has nicely grippy feet, and its display seems to sit beneath glass.

The phone pad is thick to accommodate the cooling fan and sports vents at the top and bottom to eject hot air through, and you can tilt it up and down for better viewing. The Apple Watch charger, like the AirPods pad, charges at up to 5 watts. Powering this apparatus are a braided USB-C cable and a 65W Anker USB-C wall adapter.

See Anker Charging Stand at Amazon

There’s a screen and a fan

I am a sucker for screens on devices that don’t usually have them, even when they’re extraneous; thankfully, the one on the Anker Prime Wireless Charging Station is anything but. Besides offering key info about the charging wattage of each device sitting on it, you can also cycle through a few options to set things like the charging mode, the time and date, and screen brightness. The clock function is a little under-baked; it doesn’t account for daylight savings time in the U.S. (which happened to start while I was testing it), and if you unplug the device and plug it back in, it loses the time completely. You know, like a stove clock. Thankfully, all you have to do is connect to the charger via the Anker app and the time corrects itself. As for the display, it was barely visible under the bright fluorescents of IFA 2025, where I first saw it, but, thankfully, it’s perfectly visible in normal indoor lighting conditions.

As for those charging modes, they are Ice Mode, which sets the phone charging pad’s cooling fan to full blast; Boost Mode, which is a balanced charging mode in which the fan doesn’t run as high; and Sleep Mode, which turns the fan off and is probably best if you use the charger at your bedside. It’s nice to have the choice, but also, the fan is already so quiet even in Ice Mode that I didn’t bother changing it after testing the various options.

It’s my firmly held belief that the screen is good enough that the Anker Prime Wireless Charging Station never needed an app at all, but the Anker app connects to it, so we might as well talk about it. When using the app, you’ll connect to the charger via Bluetooth, giving you a screen that shows you a picture of the Prime Charging Station, current output wattage, voltage, and amperage, and a “Real-Time Data” line graph. Tap on that, and you can see a few hours’ worth of charging history for each of the charging points.

The Price Is Too Much

It’s great that Anker has decided to come out of the gate swinging with its first Qi2.2 charging station. The Prime Wireless Charging Station is inarguably nice and certainly worth more than your average no-name Amazon charger. And the company seems like it’s really trying to justify the price with the features that this thing comes with. I really like this charging stand and don’t mind calling it one of the best 3-in-1 charging stands you can buy today.

The thing that Anker has to contend with here is that the vast bulk of its value is derived from the raw convenience of its tree-style form factor, not from its fast charging, its cooling fan, its touchscreen display, or any of the other niceties. It’s just too convenient to have one easy place to plop an iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods case at the end of the day, and the bar to improve on that is a lot higher than I think any of Anker’s extra features reach. I just can’t see myself paying $230 for this.

Anker seems to know that’s perhaps too much, and has already discounted the charger to $150 (as of this writing) within less than two months of it being announced. But that’s still more than what competing 3-in-1 Qi2.2 chargers cost; see Belkin and its own cooling fan-equipped Qi2.2 charging stand for $130, or Kuxiu, with its tri-fold Qi2.2 travel charger that’s fanless and much more vulnerable to thermal throttling in my testing, but also only costs $100. I think you’d have to be a real Anker super fan to buy the Prime Wireless Charging Station for full price or anywhere close to it. Still, it’s a great device, and it’s totally worth checking its price during Black Friday.

See Anker Charging Stand at Amazon