Jackery is jumping on the fridge-battery trend with what it says is the “world’s slimmest.” FridgeGuard also looks nice; a break from power stations that tend to look more at home at a job site than the kitchen or living room.

Measuring just 2.63 inches (67mm) thick, the Jackery FridgeGuard power station is meant to be tucked on top of, beside, or behind your refrigerator and automatically spring to life with a 10ms UPS switchover during a power outage. Its modest 800W of AC output (1600W peak) and 1kWh LFP battery will keep the typical US fridge / freezer combo running for about 10 hours — or double that if you add a 1kWh expansion battery. Jackery says its cooling fans operate at 40dB, or about as loud as a standard fridge.

While designed for fridges, there’s nothing preventing you from installing it in a bedroom to keep a CPAP breathing machine operational during a blackout, or in the living room to power lifesaving devices like a game console and TV until the grid returns.

Jackery’s FridgeGuard joins a growing list of slim batteries designed to keep food from perishing during power outages. Biolite was one of the first (it’s finally shipping in August), followed by Bluetti and fancy newcomers like Pila.

FridgeGuard is available initially as a Costco exclusive in the US starting on June 22nd. It’s priced at $559.99 for members.

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How it started

Lithium-ion batteries are everywhere as we enter the second quarter of the 21st century, and that’s a problem. From exploding e-bikes in stairwells to lithium-ion power banks combusting midflight, the volatile nature of traditional liquid electrolytes has become an undeniable public safety hazard. 

In 2025, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) issued recalls for almost 1.9 million power banks from companies like Anker, Baseus, and INIU. It also prompted recalls for tens of thousands of e-bikes over fire concerns, while issuing a rare warning to immediately stop using batteries found in several Rad Power Bikes models.

The solution, we’ve been told for at least a decade, is the solid-state battery. Its arrival is perpetually imminent and promises to deliver combustion-free battery cells that are cheap and lightweight, charge quickly, run cool, and hold ungodly amounts of energy in less space. It’s no wonder that everyone stopped in their tracks when Donut Lab claimed to have a “miracle” solid-state battery that was ready for production. We want to believe! 

Alas, what sounded too good to be true appears to be exactly that, having now been thoroughly debunked. But while the world was distracted, a new class of improved batteries has been making its way into power banks, e-bikes, and more. 

These next generation batteries aren’t liquid and they’re not solid; they’re something in between. Semi-solid-state batteries are a bridge to the future, with a gel-like composition that offers some benefits of solid-state, with far less risk of the thermal runaway exhibited by traditional lithium-ion batteries.

How it’s going

In April 2025, I reviewed the “world’s first” semi-solid-state power bank from a company called Kuxiu. Today, several additional brands sell similar products. They cost a little more but pack more energy into the same space and perform better in cold weather. More importantly, they are less likely to overheat and catch fire over their lifetimes, which can be two to three times longer than traditional lithium-ion power banks.

Each product launch is usually accompanied by a video showing lab-coated hooligans with hammers, nails, drills, pliers, and knives doing their best to bend, puncture, and tear the batteries. Spoiler: Volatile liquid electrolyte ignites, but the semi-solid gels do not.

Aside from the electrolyte, the fundamental design of a semi-solid-state battery is otherwise unchanged. You have an anode on one side of the semi-solid electrolyte and a cathode on the other, with ions scrambling back and forth as the cell charges and discharges. With minor adjustments, semi-solid-state batteries can be manufactured on the same assembly lines as their fire-prone peers. 

In other words, semi-solid-state batteries don’t need to blow up the present to power the future, and the e-bike industry has taken notice.

Ride1Up is arguably leading the charge toward semi-solid state in the US. In early May, it announced the Revv1 EVO, or what it calls “the world’s first semi-solid-state electric bike.” The 1,040Wh battery made by Heyuan Lithium Inno is meant to withstand over 1,200 charging cycles, not 500 like typical e-bike batteries, before dropping below 80 percent of its original storage capacity. It can also charge in two hours and better withstand extreme temperatures. It begins shipping in August 2026.

Not to be outdone, global bicycling giant Giant announced at the end of May that it would also be adopting semi-solid-state batteries. It’s working on at least five mass-produced e-bikes using Heyuan Lithium Inno’s semi-solid-state batteries. It has also partnered with T&D, a battery company spun out of component maker Bafang. Giant says T&D’s battery has 50 percent more capacity compared to lithium-ion and allows them to reduce the frame-integrated weight by 21 percent, according to Bike Europe. We’re still waiting for Giant to reveal the actual e-bikes.

Chinese phones have been capturing headlines with silicon-carbon batteries, but some also feature semi-solid electrolytes. The switch from graphite to silicon-carbon anodes allows these advanced batteries to pack even more energy into less space. Way back in 2024, Vivo announced the X200 series with a battery that combined a semi-solid-state electrolyte with a silicon-carbon anode. This same BlueVolt-branded battery can be found in new Vivo devices like the X300 Ultra. 

And that’s just the start. Semi-solid-state batteries are being tested or commercialized in everything from drones to EVs and those big-ass power stations used for home backup during a power outage.

What happens next

The adoption of semi-solid-state batteries across device categories is being driven, in part, by stricter rules imposed by Chinese regulators. 

New rules for e-bikes, for example, which came into force in December 2025, require batteries to pass a puncture test to see if it triggers a fire or explosion. And while power banks aren’t subjected to the same torture during certification, they still need to pass a series of rigorous tests that push liquid electrolytes to their extreme. Otherwise they won’t get China’s CCC mark (analogous to the CE mark in Europe or UL in the US) required for air travel.

This presents a compelling case for manufacturers to adopt semi-solid-state batteries, which naturally align with China’s rigorous regulatory standards. Should that happen, it would cause more assembly lines to retool and drive down the manufacturing costs, paving the way for a wider range of device categories to benefit from these sophisticated batteries.

And since China controls the world’s battery supply, all countries could eventually benefit from the improved safety. That’d be good news for the US especially, with its patchwork of state laws, city ordinances, and optional UL certifications that have so far failed to make e-bike batteries and power banks meaningfully safer nationwide. 

As for true solid-state batteries, well, we’ll just have to keep waiting. In the meantime, Donut Lab says it’s still open for business.

By the way

• US smartphones are dominated by Samsung, Apple, and Google, but none of these companies are using silicon-carbon batteries, with or without a semi-solid electrolyte, because the US gets the worst phones.
• Chinese EVs are blazing ahead with semi-solid-state-battery adoption. Notably, SAIC is following up last year’s “world’s first mass-produced semi-solid-state EV” with a $15,000 MG 4X electric SUV. Its SolidCore batteries are coming to Europe later this year. 
• The CEO of sports carmaker Lotus says we’re a decade away from the mass production of true solid-state batteries. 

Read this

• Donut Lab’s “miracle solid-state” battery was thoroughly debunked by Ryan Inis Hughes with the help of more than a dozen independent battery experts over at his Ziroth YouTube channel. The intriguing and deeply researched 45-minute video is worth a watch.  
• Electrek does a deep dive into the adoption of semi-solid-state batteries by the e-bike industry.
• This 2025 profile of Factorial by The New York Times explores the long journey to replace gasoline-powered cars with solid-state batteries. Last week, the “small Massachusetts start-up” began trading on Nasdaq.

With summer’s return, I’m again reminded of my limits as I head into the great outdoors: I can put up with a heavy, uncomfortable backpack, bug bites, mud, and even bland dehydrated food, but I will not forsake my morning brew.

I’ve tried every imaginable coffee gadget in my half-century of camping. These range from simple drip systems when ultralight backpacking, an AeroPress when not weighing every gram, French press plungers when assisted by bicycle, and small countertop coffee makers when adventuring by van. Yet I keep returning to handheld espresso makers whenever possible for reasons of taste, convenience, and — let’s face it — gadget appeal. These portable, thermos-sized machines offer a decent approximation of a real, pulled espresso when there’s no barista for miles.

There are two ways to go here. The cheapest, fastest, and easiest-to-clean models are built around Nespresso coffee capsules — you pour cold water in, press a button, and voila, liquid gold. More expensive models use ground coffee and target people who argue over things like blade versus burr grinders. Or you can get the best of both worlds with a hybrid machine that works with both coffee grounds and capsules. It doesn’t really matter which logo you buy because they all seem to share a common factory somewhere in China. Cera+ and OutIn are popular brands, but you’ll probably also be fine picking from the dozens of cheaper, alphabet-soup names found on Amazon.

Wacaco Minipresso NS

Where to Buy:

• $54.9 $46.9 at Amazon

OutIn Mino Portable Electric Espresso Machine

Where to Buy:

• $199.99 at Amazon

Ikape Kapo K2 Pro

Where to Buy:

• $199.99 at Amazon

I recently tested the Ikape Kapo K2 Pro (58mm) portable espresso machine from Cera+. It’s listed for $239 but is sold on Amazon for $200. It only works with ground coffee, but it allows you to dial in your preferred taste through granular controls over temperature, flow speed, and the length of time you want the grounds to pre-soak, stand, and extract. It features a powerful 20-bar pump and a 13,500mAh battery that recharges over USB-C. In my testing, it’s good for about five 18-to-20-gram extractions when starting with cold water. You’ll get many more if you preheat the water or use less of it. Each extraction takes about three minutes, give or take, depending upon how much water you add to the 80ml (2.7oz) reservoir.

In a blind taste test against a friend’s expensive La Marzocco espresso machine, the Ikape performed surprisingly well. Two of us plebes couldn’t taste any difference, but the owner of the fancy machine confidently could, citing a more sour and less full-bodied result from the Ikape. Mind you, we’re talking $199 versus $5,000, and even he had to admit that the handmade Italian machine didn’t produce an espresso that was 25 times better! 

On the other hand, when testing the Ikape with store-bought coffee grounds, it produced a rather lackluster espresso that wasn’t much better than what you’d get from a Nespresso capsule. To get the most out of the Ikape you’ll need to carry along a grinder, which undermines its portability.

If, like me, you enjoy coffee but don’t obsess over it, then the cleanup and fiddliness of the Ikape just isn’t worth it when traveling. The Ikape is for anyone that enjoys the slow anticipation of a really excellent espresso brewed in a place it has no right to be.

When the choice is between coffee or no coffee, it’s hard to beat the “good enough” brew produced by those no-named, handheld “espresso makers” that work with Nespresso-compatible capsules — especially when generic machines can be had for around $50. And if you pay a few cents more for official capsules, Nespresso makes it relatively painless to collect and responsibly return all those tiny aluminum pods for recycling.

Thoreau urged us to “simplify, simplify.” And really, what better way to twist that message into support for your addiction than by dropping a tiny coffee pod into a battery-powered thermos and letting modern engineering do the rest? You can still venture into the unknown and suck out all the marrow of life this summer; just make sure you’re properly caffeinated while doing it.

Photography by Thomas Ricker / The Verge