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

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

The most recent innovation is Qi2.2, the latest version of the Wireless Charging Consortium’s MagSafe-based standard, which requires a magnetic ring in the charger and is capable of producing up to 25 watts of power for Qi2.2-compatible phones. It’s really good for wireless charging, although without some additional cooling, you can’t expect it to stay at that rate for very long.

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

---

---

This is all a lot, but the good news is that the Anker Prime Wireless Charging Station does the job well, especially when it comes to the big banner feature of fast wireless charging for your smartphone. I confirmed with my partner’s iPhone 16 that this charger can reach 22.5W, as Apple says and others in the 16 line can too. And my own iPhone 15 Pro, which obviously isn’t capable of doing this, still reached around 17W and maintained it for a long time. It all depends on the stand’s own performance; Otherwise there is no good way to check it. But the end result was a phone that could charge absolutely as fast as it did when I charged it over USB-C, yet it was cool to the touch and sometimes cold when I took it off the charging pad.

These types of charging stands — the kind with two stalks, one for the phone and one for the Apple Watch and a wireless charging pad for the AirPods — aren’t usually pretty, but Anker certainly tried! It’s sturdy and weighty, and the company has used soft touch material for the base and a magnetic pad for iPhone charging. Its stalk is covered in shiny, reflective metal, the base has nicely grippable feet, and its display appears to be under glass.

The phone pad is thick to accommodate the cooling fan and sports vents at the top and bottom to expel hot air, and you can tilt it up and down for a better view. The Apple Watch charger, like the AirPods pads, charges at up to 5 watts. To power this device there is a braided USB-C cable and a 65W Anker USB-C wall adapter.

there is a screen and a fan

I’m a sucker for screens on devices that don’t usually have screens, even if they’re external; Thankfully, the Anker Prime Wireless Charging Station is nothing like that. In addition to giving you key information about the charging wattage of each device sitting on it, you can also cycle through a few options to set things like charging mode, time and date, and screen brightness. The clockwork is a bit incomplete; It doesn’t take into account daylight savings time in the US (which started when I was testing it), and if you unplug the device and plug it back in, it loses time entirely. You know, like the stove clock. Thankfully, all you need to do is connect it to the charger via the Anker app and the time is automatically set. As far as the display goes, it was barely visible under the bright fluorescents of IFA 2025 where I first saw it, but, thankfully, it’s perfectly visible under normal indoor lighting conditions.

As far as those charging modes go, they’re Ice Mode, which sets the phone charging pad’s cooling fan at full blast; Boost mode, which is a balanced charging mode in which the fan does not run as fast; And Sleep mode, which turns off the fan and is probably best if you use a charger near your bed. It’s nice to have the option, but at the same time, even in Ice mode the fan is already so quiet that I didn’t even bother changing it after testing different options.

It’s my firm belief that the screen is so good that the Anker Prime Wireless Charging Station never needed an app, but the Anker app ties into it, so we can talk about that too. 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 it, and you can see a few hours of charging history for each charging point.

the price is too high

It’s great that Anker has decided to come out of the gate with its first Qi2.2 charging station. The Prime Wireless Charging Station is undoubtedly cool and definitely worth more than your average no-name Amazon charger. And it seems like the company is really trying to justify the price with the features that come with this thing. I really like this charging stand and have no objection to calling it one of the best 3-in-1 charging stands you can buy today.

What Anker has to contend with here is that the bulk of its value comes from the raw convenience of its tree-style form factor, not from its fast charging, its cooling fan, its touchscreen display, or any other niceties. Having a handy place to put an iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods case at the end of the day is very convenient, and the level of improvement on this far outweighs any additional features from Anker in my opinion. I can’t see myself paying $230 for this.

It seems Anker knows that’s probably too much, and has already discounted the charger by $150 (at the time of this writing) less than two months after the announcement. But that’s still higher than the price of competing 3-in-1 Qi2.2 chargers; Check out Belkin and its own cooling fan-equipped Qi2.2 Charging Stand for $130, or check out Kuxiu with its tri-fold Qi2.2 Travel Charger, which is fanless and more sensitive to thermal throttling in my testing, but also costs only $100. I think you’d have to be a real Anker super fan to buy the Prime Wireless Charging Station at full price or anywhere near it. Still, it’s a great device, and it’s totally worth checking out its price during Black Friday.