CalypsoCrystal TimelessMoment charging stand for Apple Watch review

Well before the actual release of the Apple Watch, CalypsoCrystal added a couple of Watch accessories to their product line.  Their Timeless accessories included a beautiful leather-wrapped arc of a charging stand, which I loved at first sight.  Once I got my Apple Watch, I decided I needed a charging stand, and I was lucky to be selected to evaluate the TimelessMoment stand when CalypsoCrystal released it.  

The appearance of the TimelessMoment didn’t disappoint.  It’s made of beautiful, soft, grained leather with a sueded texture.  The stitching was even and straight, and the leather smelled marvelous.  The TimelessMoment is available in Calibre (black), Resonance (creamy white), Cuvette (bordeaux red), and the Balance (orange) that I received.  The color and the overall look of the charging stand says “elegance”, and it would look perfectly suited to charging the most expensive of the Apple Watch Edition models.  However, my Watch Sport (seen above wearing the green Sport band) doesn’t look out of place.

The TimelessMoment stand is about 8.75″ across the bottom, and it stands about 4″ tall at the pinnacle.  It’s not tiny, but it should fit on your desktop or nightstand with no problem.  Because of the shape of this stand, it will work best with Watches wearing a band that can fully open, like the Sport band or some of the leather bands offered by Apple.  The Link Bracelet and the Milanese bands won’t open completely, so the Watch can’t be charged on this stand unless you slide the end of the TimelessMoment stand through the loop of the band and lay the Watch sideways over the charging stand – not as elegant a look as laying the band along the length of the charging stand.

This view from the top shows you the channel in the underside of the charging stand for the thick rubber collar that reinforces the junction of the the cable and the magnetic charger.

The underside of the charging stand shows the rest of the channel that will hold and guide the charging cable out one of the feet of the stand.

These two images are representative of my first efforts at inserting the Watch’s charger into the TimelessMoment.  The opening just wasn’t big enough and it didn’t have enough “give” for me to force the plastic charger that comes with the Sport model into the stand.  I was pushing so hard I was afraid I’d damage the magnetic charger.  I had heard that the metal charger that comes with the Watch and Watch Edition models was a bit smaller than the plastic charger that comes with the Sport.  I didn’t want to purchase a metal charger at $30-40 for a review, so I first contacted CalypsoCrystal’s customer service to ask if they had checked the fit with the plastic charger.  I had to try a couple of times before I got a reply, which wasn’t exactly an answer.  They didn’t say if the plastic charger would work, but they told me I should rub some leather conditioner or hand lotion into the inside of the charger silo.  I didn’t have any leather conditioner, so I tried some hand lotion.

I rubbed the hand lotion into just the cylinder that holds the magnetic charger and started trying to insert the Watch’s charger.  You can see the lotion made the leather dye bleed a bit.  Luckily, I was able to rub that off my charger before the white plastic was stained by the dye.  Even with the hand lotion, it was a struggle to force the magnetic charger into the stand.  I managed to get it in so that it lined up nicely with the upper edge of the collar, thinking that the Watch’s health sensors “bump” would fit down against the magnetic charger.  What I didn’t count on, and apparently neither did the folks at CalypsoCrystal, is that the way the band connectors are shaped and how they fit into the body of the Watch doesn’t allow the Watch to lay completely flat.  At least with the Sport bands I have (and I have four now), the stiffness of the band and the angle of the connectors caused the Watch to float just above the recessed magnetic charger.

I forced the charger in some more, until I got it into the position you see above.  What you may be able to see in this image is that the side where the cable connects couldn’t be forced up as high as the opposite side.  The channel to hold the rubber collar wasn’t deep enough to allow me to push the cable side any higher.  Because the magnetic charger really needed to be even higher above the surface of the TimelessMoment than I could manage, I had to wiggle the Watch Sport around a bit to get it to make a connection with the charger at all.  I didn’t hear that “click” that lets me know the magnets have snapped the charger firmly to the back of the Watch.

The above image also shows some greasy lotion stains on the leather.  This happened while I was trying to force the charger into position.  These greasy marks did fade a bit with time.

Here you can see that I did manage to make a connection with the Watch Sport, as proven by the small lightning bolt at the middle top of the Watch’s screen.

This is the underside of the TimelessMoment with the magnetic charger forced into position.  You can see that the rubber collar is severely bent to get the charger into position.  Despite this, it really needed to bend some more to get the magnetic charger level (which I couldn’t do), and I couldn’t get the rest of the charging cable to lay in the holding channel without bending the cable at the other end of the reinforcing collar.  You’ll also notice a lot of grease stains here from the hand lotion; these also dried to be less noticable.

I love the look of the TimelessMoment charging stand, but it doesn’t seem to be designed to work with the Apple Watch Sport.  CalypsoCrystal does classify their mobile accessories as “luxury products”, so it’s entirely possible they never intended this charging stand to be used with the lowly Sport.  I don’t have access to either of the higher-end Apple Watches to check how they work with this charging stand, nor do I have access to the metal charger that comes with those models – and I’m not going to buy one when my plastic magnetic charger works perfectly well.  It could be that the metal charger will slide into position seamlessly and the leather bands on the higher-end Watches may lay flat enough that the sensors on the back of the Watch can lay low enough to make contact with the magnetic charger without having to force it above the surface of the TimelessMoment charging stand.  However, it doesn’t seem to work well with the Apple Watch Sport and its plastic magnetic charger.

Source:  The TimelessMoment charging stand used in this review was provided by CalypsoCrystal.  Learn more that their website.