The IT Nerd

Father’s Day is coming up and a very common gift is a new wallet. But instead of giving Dad yet another wallet that looks the same as his last wallet, how about serving up something with a bit of style and tech? To that end, let me introduce to you the Ekster Aluminum Cardholder:

This is a 6061-T6 aluminumaluminum wallet built for quick access of all your cards via two compartments. It’s also capable of carrying cash in the form of bills as well.

The expandable metal backplate allows you to carry a pair of cards that you frequently access (credit cards for example) while keeping a slim profile. There a notch at the bottom center of this section that helps you to push them out so that you can get to them.

The main section of cardholder fans out your cards at the click of a button. This is where you store your less frequently used cards. The cardholder holds a maximum of 6 non-embossed cards, or a combination of 4 – 5 embossed/non-embossed cards (depending on the thickness of each card).

One handy thing that this cardholder offers is RFID protection

There’s one more trick that this cardholder has:

You can get an optional Tracker Card so that you can track down this wallet if you lose it. The tracker card is powered by powered by Chipolo technology and is recharged by sunlight. It takes 3 hours of charge and lasts 2-3 months on a charge. That allows you to find the wallet via Bluetooth LE 4.0 from up to 200 feet away. Using the Chipolo app you can ring the tracker card so that you can play a game of “Marco Polo” to find it, or see it’s last location that it was near your phone if you do lose it. From the party tricks department, you can use the card to ring your phone if you misplace that, or you can use Google Assistant, Alexa and Siri to help you find the wallet. Of course there’s also the Chipolo network that can help you to find your cardholder should you use it. Based on this map their network seems to be concentrated on the East Coast of the US, the West Coast of the US, the Mid-West, Central Canada, Western Europe, Japan and South Korea. Which means that if you live in those areas, your odds of finding this carholder improves significantly.

Now, I was planning to test this out, but my wife got her hands on it before I did and immediately wanted to test it out herself as she keeps her various cards loose in her purse, which means she has a habit of misplacing them. For example, she misplaced her health insurance card when we needed it to book our COVID shots. Based on the fact that she said her cards went “flying everywhere” inside the car when she went to pay for something at a drive thru, I searched the car for 10 minutes and eventually found it under a seat in a very hard to get to place. So I acquiesced and let her try this out for a few days. Here’s her feedback:

• She likes the RFID protection that this cardholder offers.
• It keeps all her daily essential cards.
• From a woman’s perspective, it really helps to keep everything organized and makes it easy to go from purse to purse.
• It is super slim so you can leave your purse at home and simply take the card holder with you with everything you need.
• It is solid and it has some weight to it. But it’s functional weight so that’s fine.
• It is easy to organize your cards so that you have easy access to whatever you need at the click of a button or a push in the notch of the backplate.
• You can still carry cash if you need to.

Though I never got the card holder back from my wife, and I am apparently not going to because she likes it so much, I can say from a male perspective, that having everything in such a slim packages would be a win for me. Which means I will have to get one of these for myself. If I got one of these as a gift, I’d be very happy.

The Ekster Aluminum Cardholder goes for $63 USD direct from Ekster and has 8 color options. The Tracker Card is optional and goes for $39 USD (down from $49 USD). This is a really cool cardholder that doesn’t add any bulk and I also should say looks cool and modern. It makes a great gift for Dad, and apparently works well for women too.

This entry was posted on May 29, 2021 at 2:58 pm and is filed under Products with tags Ekster. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.