Announcing the weBoost Drive Sleek

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You’ve never seen a cell booster that looks like this. The weBoost Drive Sleek, just announced by our friends at weBoost, the company powered by the might of Wilson Electronics.

The first thing you’ll see is that this is a major upgrade in appearance. Take a look at the last-generation vehicle booster from weBoost:

and you’ll realize that the old one looks like a 2000s flip phone compared to the new one. The new one is the first cellular booster that lives up to the name “Sleek,” a model designation that weBoost and Wilson have used before several times. With the new booster, you get a good-looking mount that clips on with a clever little magnet and looks like it belongs with today’s phones.

As phones get bigger, you need a different cradle to work with them. The Drive Sleek’s cradle doesn’t have anything on the left or right and extends much higher than previous cradle so it should be able to handle pretty much any giant phone on the market. I think it could even handle most 7 inch tablets.

The design change is made possible by putting a lot of the electronics in a separate module which hides under the seat in a permanent installation. The cradle itself is just an antenna really, from what I could see.

The point of a vehicle cell booster like this one is to provide max boost to one phone. The cradle is powered by your accessory “lighter” socket but it also allows you to charge your phone through the same adapter. When the phone is in the cradle it gets up to about 20dB of boost, which doesn’t seem like a lot but since the phone is so close to the antenna, all that boost goes into the phone unlike other boosters where you lose about 90% of the boost in 6 feet (that’s just how radio transmission works, nothing can be done about that.)

I tested the Drive Sleek and made a few videos which I’ll feature here in the next few days, but if you’re curious they’re already posted on our product page for the Drive Sleek. Because of weBoost’s long history with making quality cellular signal boosters, I wasn’t surprised that this one does what it says. In fact, it’s earned a place in my car permanently!

The only thing that I think would have been better would have been if the cradle also acted as a Qi wireless charging port. Since Apple is now firmly behind the standard (and Samsung has been for a while) it’s obviously going to be “the” way we charge our phones in our cars. Adding it to the cradle probably wouldn’t have added much thickness. I don’tknow if it would have interfered with the boost function, though.

Overall, I found the new Drive Sleek from weBoost to be a very competent little piece of electronic gear, and unlike earlier boosters it looks at home with large smartphones. If you’re curious… check out the weBoost Drive Sleek now at Solid Signal!

About the Author

Stuart Sweet
Stuart Sweet is the editor-in-chief of The Solid Signal Blog and a "master plumber" at Signal Group, LLC. He is the author of over 10,000 articles and longform tutorials including many posted here. Reach him by clicking on "Contact the Editor" at the bottom of this page.