Une Bobine (French for “a coil”) is a cable, dock, tripod, and stand in a single product. Back in 2012, The Fuse Chicken Une Bobine launched as a Kickstarter project and quickly received almost $213,000 dollars. The product’s promise of an “all-in-one” cable/dock that you could shape to your heart’s content made it extremely popular. How does the Bobine hold up?
Une Bobine is a dock/tripod for Android devices, devices with an Apple Lightning connector (6, 6 plus, 5s, 5c, 5), as well as iPod Touch 5th Generation; there is also a 30 pin connector version for Apple devices. Une Bobine features an approximately 24 inch long metal cable using military-grade, nickel-plated steel. After using it for several weeks, we feel that Une Bobine is well worth the price of admission at only $35.
The Une Bobine is at its core, a charging cable for your device. It does its basic job well, but what sets the product high on our list of must have accessories is its design. Jon Fawcett, of Fuse Chicken, designed the Bobine to allow users to prop their devices up to more accessible and better places. While it allows a user to create a dock in almost any location, it is not perfect. When we first received this product we tried bending and shaping the dock to fit different areas and some didn’t hold their shape.
Une Bobine’s cable is only 24 inches long and it often left us wanting much more to play with on a large surface area such as a desk. Une Bobine works well with any case that has an open design on the bottom to access the ports, but a case such as the Otterbox Defender series doesn’t work well.
Une Bobine requires that it be coiled as a “base” to hold the phone in the user’s desired location. A user must create a loop with the cable in order for the Une Bobine to hold the docked device’s weight. The structure of Une Bobine becomes top-heavy when a smartphone is docked incorrectly; it begins to sag immediately if there is no base for the Une Bobine to rely on.
This limits the product and the user’s flexibility to be creative with Une Bobine. While this isn’t a deal breaker for us, the Bobine can only realistically be placed in a set number of shapes and thus limits its placement because of its design.
Une Bobine does what it does extremely well. It is fun to experiment with, and for a mere $35, we love it. Une Bobine allows us to dock our phone next to our monitor, high on a kitchen counter to read a recipe, on the side of our laptop, in our car for navigation (with an additional “car-kit” fee of $5), or anywhere you can create a small loop base with the Une Bobine.
Once we experimented with it and found the correct way to use Une Bobine, it was fun and satisfying to use. Une Bobine has its flaws, but we can forgive them for its ultimately unique and innovative design. We look forward to seeing the next iterations of the flexible charger cable/dock that is Une Bobine.