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back to article Wireless charger posse smacks down rival in EXPLICIT video

The Alliance for Wireless Power has approved its own standard and is promising products soon in the hope that its superior technology will help it fight back against rival Qi's first-to-market advantage. The Qi standard is being pushed by the Wireless Power Consortium, and is already in the Nexus 4 and Nokia Lumia phones, but …

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  1. o5ky
    WTF?

    Surely it's just an induction coil? so they should be compatible

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Don't be ridiculous. That wouldn't be patentable. I'm sure it's a SPECIAL, "novel", "non-obvious" induction coil that someone can patent and make money from.

      ("novel" and "non-obvious" having the standard patent lawyer definitions - i.e. no-one's ever filed a patent that discribes it exactly).

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    2. Wortel
      Reply Icon

      We'll just change the frequency and voltage of our kit so it won't resonate (as well) with your kit.

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  2. FartingHippo
    Boffin

    Wireless charging the easy way

    1. Fit a small, fold-out wind turbine to every phone.

    2. Blow (or switch on the desk fan).

    Oh, bugger, I can't patent that now, can I :(

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  3. Fuzz

    popular peoples front

    They're going to struggle to get a competing standard off the ground unless Samsung can get the wireless charging sorted on the S3.

    Apple will bring out their own version anyway or wait until a clear victor is decided and then act like they were the first phones to have it.

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  4. martin 17
    Joke

    Splitter

    Excuse me. Are you the Judean People's Front?

    Fuck off! We're the People's Front of Judea

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    1. frank ly
      Reply Icon

      Re: Splitter

      The People's Judean Front are the ones to join, if you like social events.

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  5. andreas koch
    Joke

    I can see where this is going:

    This is going to be like this:

    The Alliance will support their standard and the Consortium will support their own. Then they'll talk about a consolidation and bring out a third, completely incompatible standard that exceeds the former two in some way. This future standard will then be the one that some company* will have invented first and it'll cost all other makers something like 25$ per unit to use.

    Then the treehuggers will come and find out that the field density is a lot higher than anything that any cell phone tower or overhead power line ever produced** and will rally against it for a couple of years and try to get it banned for health reasons. All companies will decide to drop it because of the negative publicity and promote the healthy new "wireless-free charging" per "eco-friendly", "environmentally-conscious" CW2AP***, at which point we're all back to square one, just 10 years older.

    Hurhurhur.

    * guess who. . .

    ** strange, really, that they haven't done that already; makes me wonder.

    *** Copper Wire With A Plug

    3 1
    1. ShadowedOne
      Reply Icon
      Stop

      Re: I can see where this is going:

      "Then the treehuggers will come and ..."

      Regardless of their views on the environment, they aren't 'tree-huggers', they are neurotic hypochondriacs.

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  6. Jolyon Smith
    Facepalm

    When you only have one feature...

    Be sure to demo it twice and add techno-babble to make it sound impressive/more than it is.

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  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Underwhelmed!

    Is it just me that doesn't see any point to either of the current wireless charging technologies?

    - If I'm putting my phone on a small charging pad, I might as well have a dock there!

    - I would still use a cable when travelling, because it packs up smaller and lighter.

    - I don't know of many small tech devices that need charging more than once a day now, so if I only need it max once per day then I'm not sure I'm saving much effort by putting my phone on it's charging mat when I go to bed vs putting it in its dock.

    - I'm not convinced that being able to lift a phone an inch off the charging mat can be called "spatial freedom".

    I'll give them a few more years to develop it - once I can have a wireless charger under my sofa, and my phone and iPad will charge while I'm using them sat on the sofa, then I'll maybe consider one!

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    1. Jolyon Smith
      Reply Icon

      Re: Underwhelmed!

      Indeed - I have more "spatial freedom" using a cable to charge... instead of a cuboid charging space roughly 4 x 20 x 15 centimetres (guesstimating the size of the pad in the video), I get a potentially spheroidal cubing space with a radius of 1.5 METRES!

      OK, so in practice I cannot actually use all of that space, but that's because the spatial freedom offered is so great, it actually impinges on other important spaces!! Like my bedside table. Even the small fraction of the potential charging sphere that I can use is significantly larger than the pitiful cuboid offered by A4WP.

      Having said ALL that.... where I can see this working is in the workplace... at home my phone is either in use or charging overnight. But at work I am up and down from my desk all day and don't want to have to keep docking and undocking my phone if I take it with me, so it would be handy to have a charging pad on my desk.

      But at home.... ? Nah.

      In a nutshell - wireless charging may supplement wired charging, but it aint gonna replace it anytime soon.

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    2. Brangdon
      Reply Icon

      Re: Underwhelmed!

      Eventually docks will become wireless too. There's a critical point where both connectivity and charging can be done wirelessly and at a range of 40cm or so. Sit down at a desk, and the keyboard and monitor connect to your phone (or tablet) automagically. You can run CPU-intensive tasks (including the wireless connection itself) and not have to worry about the power that uses because of the wireless charging.

      If someone gets all the bits sorted out and working nicely, I think it will be compelling. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple was the first to do it, as that sort of unified vision is what they do well. On the other hand, it is also the vision that led Microsoft to unify their mobile and desktop operating systems, and they potentially have a unique advantage there. (Obviously Windows 8 isn't there yet; this stuff needs up to 5 years more work.)

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  8. Benchops

    Anyone want to buy

    a betamax VCR?

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