Oblio

Oblio is a 10W Qi charging pad that doubles as a UV steriliser, and Lexon says 20 minutes inside it removes 99.9% of the germs from a phone's screen and surfaces. The pad was designed for Lexon by the Italian duo Andrea Quaglio and Manuela Simonelli.

Charging works by induction. Power passes from a coil in the base to a coil in the phone with no cable plugged into the handset, which is how any Qi certified pad operates. The difference here is that the same unit also runs a sanitising cycle. It uses anti-bacterial UV light combined with ionizer technology, and the cycle runs automatically.

UV light only reaches what it can see. A phone lying face up would have its back left untouched, so Lexon says to flip the phone over for a complete 360° disinfection of the handset. An LED shows whether the phone is sitting correctly and what the charging status is. The charger also has foreign object detection, and it fits Qi phones up to 8.3 cm wide and 1.05 cm thick, in a case that isn't metal.

Lexon states that the sanitiser was laboratory tested against common bacteria and scientifically proven effective against viruses including H1N1. Those are the maker's claims, and they are specific enough to check. What the pad offers is a phone that gets charged and cleaned in the same spot on a desk or bedside table, without a second device to find room for.