Wireless charging is popular on many mobile devices these days, but most of the rechargeable flashlights have either a cable you need to plug in or a magnetic charger. Brinyte has come up with a flashlight that uses inductive charging to charge up the light. Today I have a prototype version of the Brinyte WT01. Thanks to them for sending it to me to take a look at.
Full Image Gallery: https://imgur.com/a/Yhdc5Co
YouTube Version of this Review:
Packaging
With my light being a prototype the packaging was not anything near final form. It was a sturdy brown cardboard box. Accessories included the light itself, unbranded generic 3000mAh protected button top 18650 battery, Generic international 2A AC USB adapter with US adapter plug, Charging cradle and microUSB cable.
Construction & Design
The light is made from aluminum, and will be offered in a sand and black anodizing. My prototype was in the Sand color and unfortunately it’s paint and not anodizing. The result is it’s not a very durable finish. I have been assured that in the production version this will be a hard anodizing.
As far as design it’s a larger light. It’s capable of using a 18650 battery with the included spacer or a 26650. Starting at the tail cap, it’s a bit large, and simple. It tail stands nicely. The tail cap is glued in place. On the body tube there is a slight ring to do a cigar grip on. Moving on to the body tube, there are rings milled in and then 4 flats milled in. On my example these flats don’t always line up with the switch which is a little disappointing.
Inside this is a double wall design, threads on the body tube are fine and square cut cut, I would prefer something a bit more course to make it a little easier to thread on and minimize the risk of cross threading. One thing that does happen is when you take off the head and put it back on the light does come on in low mode. There are springs on both the head and tail of the light.
The head of the light itself is pretty smooth, with minimal heat syncing. The switch is electronic and covered by a green silicone cover. It has green and red LED’s under used when charging. The front bezel is smooth, and able to be unscrewed. The glass lens is anti reflective coated. Underneath is a deep smooth reflector and the LED is nicely centered.
Size and Weight
I measured overall length at 156mm, width at its widest point was 45mm, and at it’s thinnest point 33mm. Weight with the included battery is 313g
While this light is capable of running at 26650 battery and double wall construction it just feels a bit long and a bit thick. The tailcap adds to the length.
LED/Runtime
SST-40 LED with deep smooth reflector that’s a fairly neutral white. The SST-40 is a pretty good LED in my opinion. It doesn’t seem to suffer noticeable rainbow but it does seem to turn a bit more green a lower power inputs. The beam is more of a thrower. It has a small hot center, with a small area around that center of corona before it fades into the spill.
Runtimes
I did my runtime testing with the included 3000mAh generic button top protected battery the light came with. Total runtime was just at 100 minutes of usable light. It did do a pretty good job of being able to sustain it’s brightest mode for almost 20 minutes.
UI
UI on this light is non traditional but not complicated. It has 4 output modes of constant light and starts at high, then decreases to medium, then low, each time the button is pressed then off. Press the power button again and you get turbo, then it steps down through all the lower modes. The mode spacing is pretty even to the eye.
Brinyte lists outputs as:
Turbo 1100 Lumens
High 430 Lumens
Medium 70 Lumens
Low 10 Lumens
Strobe and SOS 1100 Lumens
Long press for 2 seconds to reach the 2 blinking modes of Strobe and SOS. To go back to constant on mode you have to go through both blinking modes and the light will resume to where you left off. There were no No shortcuts to go to turbo or to shut off
Light does come on in low if you disconnect the head and reconnect it with a battery inside.
Recharging
This light uses wireless inductive charging in it’s cradle. The cradle is pretty basic, no instruction or lights on it, just a microUSB port. It appears to be using Qi charging, because my Anker Qi chargers recognize the light and it goes through a sequence where it starts to charge but then stops. My guess this is because the inductive coils are not oriented correctly. My guess would be these run around the tail cap and are not on the flat where they would be for a phone typically. The cradle draws 0.2A (about 1W) on standby regardless of if it’s charging or not which is kind of high.
When charging the flashlight has a Red LED inside the button that comes on and it goes green when fully charged. I observed a 1.2A charging rate during charging, so a flat battery took 3 hours and 30 minutes to fully charge. The charging curve was pretty flat, not the usual taper. At the end I measured cell voltage at 4.17V. I will insert a photo of what I found overall capacity of the cell was at when I put it through a capacity test.
One other feature I noticed when recharging this light was that when you pull it off the charger it automatically comes on in low mode, or if the power is stopped to the charger. I could see this being useful for use if your house were to lose mains power and it would help you locate the light.
Pro
- SST-40 LED, Fairly neutral white, solid beam performance
- I like that colors are being offered from the beginning. Hopefully the anodizing will be more durable.
- Nice to see someone try inductive charging on a flashlight.
Con
- It’s a chunky light, and personally I don’t find it very attractive.
- Recharging cradle draws 0.20a (About 1W) on standby regardless of if it’s charging or not. Kind of high.
- UI is just different I would like to long press to turn off, and double click to go to turbo, maybe triple click to go to strobe.
Conclusion
I like the idea of wireless charging that doesn’t have exposed contacts but not if the cost is a larger light. Design wise I feel like the light is just a bit too generic and large for me. I don’t love that the tail cap is glued in place, but understand why they are doing it. I would like to see them go back to the drawing board and try to reduce the overall size of the light and add some more interesting design features.
With the emergency power type of feature I think I will set this light on my kitchen counter in it’s charging cradle so that if the power goes off it will automatically come on and can easily be found. I would like to see at the minimum a UI tweak to allow you to shut off the light without cycling all the way through the other modes.
It’s fun taking a look at a prototype light, let’s see if Brinyte makes any changes to the production version before I can say definitely if I give it a recommendation or not.