Wireless Power Group Has 'Qi' Prototypes

judgecorp writes "Steady progress on inductive wireless charging. There are now certified prototypes of chargers for Blackberry and iPhone devices that meet the Qi specification of the Wireless Power Consortium, which was announced last year. The spec has advanced from version 0.95 to 1.0, too."

Re:Not sure what the benefit is

[HelioWalton]

I believe the idea is that you have one charger plate that you would always leave plugged in, and it works for all of your devices that have a power receiver plugged in (Or built in, I suppose). You wouldn't have to "hunt around for the induction charger plate", since you would have one between all of your devices. It would be like a bowl for your keys at the door - When you come in, you can just chuck your stuff onto the charger plate, and hey presto, it's charged next time you grab it. No fiddly wires to plug or unplug when you come in.

Re:Efficient? Better in any way?

[Amouth]

...
I can see the added value for things like electric toothbrushes - those must be encased in a water proof shell. But the whole point of phones is that you replace them every 1-2 years. Making them stronger and water proof is bad business.

actually there is no reason not to do contact based charging with a water proof object just make the exposed metal contacts out of a non corrosive metal - gold plating is best, chrome plating works for low voltage/current - solid nickel works really well.

Re:Counter-intuitive?

[mcgrew]

when I have to degauss hard drives they get HOT and degaussers don't just ruin the data on the platters but also annihilate ICs and most components on the PC board

You must be using a VERY high power degausser. My eight year old old Trinitron degausses every time I turn it on, but its ICs and other components don't suffer for it. I'm sure that this isn't so powerful you'll ruin your phone.

If you remove the drives before degaussing them, you won't lose the rest of the parts.

Re:Efficient? Better in any way?

[ConfusedVorlon]

well - they pretty much are now.

the EU threatened the phone companies with compulsory standardisation if they didn't play nice, so they all agreed to standardise on usb chargers.

ok, so there are a bunch of USB plug formats, and yes Apple exempted themselves, but nonetheless we are pretty close to a standard charger now.

Re:Efficient? Better in any way?

[rthille]

No, diodes can make it so electricity can only "come in" to the device, not leave it.