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At CES 2026, where every tech company seemed legally obligated to add AI to something, Ugreen announced a power bank with voice recording. The MagFlow AI Voice Recording Magnetic Power Bank packs 10,000 mAh, wireless charging, and AI-powered note-taking into one device. It’s either brilliantly practical or completely unnecessary, depending on how often you find yourself needing both a dead phone and a voice memo at the exact same moment.
The real question is what market Ugreen’s actually targeting. Dedicated AI recorders like Plaud and Limitless offer superior transcription and integration with productivity tools. Meanwhile, power bank buyers are mostly obsessed with capacity, charging speed, and MagSafe compatibility. Ugreen’s product sits awkwardly between these worlds, somehow simultaneously targeting both the serious note-taker as well as the charging purist. Maybe that’s the genius: creating a category where none existed, or maybe it’s just feature creep with good intentions.
Designer: Ugreen
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You’ve got 10,000 mAh, which is respectable but standard for MagSafe-compatible power banks in 2026. Wireless charging is included, though the company hasn’t confirmed whether there’s a USB-C port for wired fast charging. A digital display shows battery level and presumably real-time charging stats. Then there’s the voice recording hardware with built-in AI for translation and summarization, which sounds impressive until you realize Ugreen hasn’t explained how you’ll actually access these recordings. Is there an app? Does it sync to your phone? Do you have to plug it into a computer and dig through files like it’s 2015?
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Compare this to something like the Plaud NotePin, which costs around $169 and is purpose-built for recording. It connects seamlessly to your phone, transcribes in real time, integrates with LLMs like ChatGPT for summaries, and weighs practically nothing. Or look at the power bank side of things. Ugreen’s own Qi2 25W MagFlow Power Bank retails for $89.99 (currently $69.99 on Amazon) and does one thing exceptionally well: charges your devices fast. This new AI version will almost certainly cost more, probably around $120 to $150 if I had to guess, which puts it in direct competition with premium power banks that offer higher capacity or faster charging speeds. Not to mention most AI services do come with the looming threat of a subscription fee at some point. Imagine subscribing to a power bank…
Jokes aside, the bundling makes sense if you’re the kind of person who carries too much stuff and wants to consolidate. A journalist running between interviews could theoretically use this to charge their phone while recording background audio for articles. Students might appreciate having one device that keeps their laptop alive during lectures while capturing notes they can summarize later. But these use cases feel niche, and niche products need exceptional execution to justify their existence. Ugreen hasn’t shown us that yet. The company has a solid track record with GaN charging technology and their NASync NAS series crushed it on Kickstarter with $6.6 million raised. They know how to build hardware. Whether they can build software that makes voice recording feel natural on a battery pack is the real test.
The post UGREEN built an AI Recorder into its 10,000mAh Power Bank and I don’t know if that’s genius or crazy… first appeared on Yanko Design.