Bizarre Product Design: These Snowflake-Shaped Charging Port Cleaning Tools

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This strange-looking object, by a company whose name has four consonants in a row, is a tool for cleaning out charging ports on smartphones and tablets.

It features a variety of picks, brushes and scrapers, as well as a kind of scrubber port that you load with (included) "detergent" to clean the male connector. It can also be used to clean wireless earbuds and their cases.

The tool has the same challenge as countless EDC multi-bit tools, but rather than going with a cylindrical form factor, they’ve opted for a snowflake shape. I can’t fathom why. The only other tool I’ve seen that uses this shape is a spark plug gap gauge, but it was coin-sized; this thing here is 3.5" across.

They also offer this more organic-looking variant.

I don’t deny that there’s a need for this tool, particularly if you do a lot of outdoor stuff. (I actually have to keep a little plug in my phone’s charging port, otherwise it becomes so clogged I can’t charge it.) I’m just taken aback at the form, and the tool’s overall popularity; it’s got 2,000 reviews and 4.5 stars on Amazon.

These run $20.

Core77