Wireless Charging Standards Groups Agree To Merge 65
jfruh writes: The world where our gadgets all charge wirelessly has been delayed by several factors, one of which is that there are three industry groups promoting rival technological standards. That problem is now a little closer to a solution, as the Alliance for Wireless Power and the Power Matters Alliance announced a plan to merge.
Joining in (Score:2, Redundant)
I have just formed the Power Alliance for Wireless, which I will agree to "merge" with you all also for only $10k, payable directly to me.
I think you'll find that the combined group can make far better use of my acronym, PAW, than it can with either AWP or PMA, both of which sound like you have something lodged in the windpipe.
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I have just formed the Power Alliance for Wireless, which I will agree to "merge" with you all also for only $10k, payable directly to me.
Don't be slut. You're almost giving it away for free at that price.
If Apple is holding out for 40% of the retail price for each unit, you should at least be holding out for 35%.
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But one major alternative still exists (Score:1)
summary should have said so
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And don't forget that wireless charging of devices also is a very ineffective way to charge. A lot of magnetic radiation is just not ending up where it's intended to be.
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Consumers won't care the slightest
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Wireless charging is ineffective? Do you actually use it? I've used it for months and it charges my phone quite nicely and conveniently.
You could argue that some energy is lost to the ether, but that really doesn't affect me. Sure, It's not as fast as a quality cable charger, but it's still faster than the knock-off chargers that most people use. In any event it's fast enough to get me charged up for a while.
Plugging\unplugging cables doesn't sound like a terrible chore, but when you go wireless, you get ve
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(which is a Mountek magnetic mount with a Nexus Qi charger attached. The phone is Nexus 5)
Do you have a link for what you mean by this? I am intrigued in your solution as I have been shopping for something on these lines recently.
With apologies (Score:5, Funny)
Well you know what that [xkcd.com] means.
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None of us is as dumb as all of us?
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Soemtimes it works out that way, other times however things do converge, it used to be that every phone vendor needed their own chargers (or at least adaptor cables but even that could be dodgy). Nowadays they all use 5V and most of them use a microUSB connector to deliver it. In the early days of power over ethernet there were serveral competing standards. Nowadays all the major vendors use the IEEE standard. In the early days of computer networks there were many standards, now pretty much everyone uses BA
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That is because of a EU directive specifying that phones have micro USB for charging, not because of a diverse industry suddenly making sense.
(although, before that, the world had almost settled on mini USB.)
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You have no idea what the word 'merge' means, do you?
You just wanted to karma-whore by posting an irrelevant XKCD-link. Shame on you.
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Why would someone that has been at the cap for over a decade need to karma whore? Also, funny mods have not increased karma for at least as long.
The joke here, for people that lack either foresight or humor (and, to be fair, you are right, most xkcd jokes are just not funny); is that while they intend to merge the standards, they will probably end up either picking one of the two or creating a third one.
Note how the article (did you read it?) worded this. "set up an as yet unnamed organization" That sounds
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Why would someone that has been at the cap for over a decade need to karma whore? Also, funny mods have not increased karma for at least as long.
I'm not sure that improves your position.
The joke here, for people that lack either foresight or humor (and, to be fair, you are right, most xkcd jokes are just not funny);
I never said that.
is that while they intend to merge the standards, they will probably end up either picking one of the two or creating a third one.
Note how the article (did you read it?)
I did.
worded this. "set up an as yet unnamed organization" That sounds like a 3rd standards body to me.
You forgot the start of that sentence: "They have agreed to merge their two organizations by mid-2015 and set up an as yet unnamed organization ..." (remember what I said about your knowledge of the meaning of the word 'merge'? I'll help you. Replace 'and setup' by 'into' and read the sentence again. Remember that it was a reporter who wrote the sentence.)
The key point you're missing is that the XKCD-comic is about a third party creating a
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The device itself was released in 2013, so it is the newer of the google wireless chargers. I am not sure which standard it is using. I was unaware there was more than one standard before reading this article. And I have not tried my device on a different wireless charger.
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Worse. They'll also come up with one that tries to combine the two (and fails), and one that tries to fix the mess (and fails spectacularly).
In the end you'll have consumers sitting here, twiddling their thumbs and waiting for which standard will eventually win out, only to end up with no adaptation of either because "there is no market".
Re:How does it help? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How does it help? (Score:5, Insightful)
I suspect in the end, like Ethernet, Token Ring, DECnet, and other IEEE 802 network standards, one will win-out over the others. And like IEEE 802, it'll take close to 30 years for that one that becomes dominant to win-out, and it'll have some ridiculous limitations (like Ethernet's 100m physical limit and Ethernet's relatively small frame size) that plague its use for all time.
100m is hardly a ridiculous limitation, it's a tradeoff among speed, cost of media and transceivers and distance. Granted, it can be a problem in some circumstances, but the limit had to be set to *something*.
If you want to pay more for media and transceivers to get more distance you can use fiber. Or if you willing to trade speed for distance, you can get VDSL repeaters and extend the range to over a kilometer and you can use existing CAT-5 (or even CAT-3) wiring.
All of my network equipment supports 9000+ byte frames, how big would a frame need to be to stop being ridiculous? With TCP offloading, Jumbo frames don't make a huge difference in throughput.
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My Ethernet can do 500m and my other Ethernet can do 185m.
Token Ring cable length is only 101 meters with STP, 45 with UTP and the speeds are not that great either. Token Ring has/had its own limitations and I can see why it is no longer the network of choice.
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My Ethernet does 10km, 20km, 40km and 80km and 120km at various speeds up to 100Gbps all with off the shelf transceivers over either 1 or 2 cores of single mode fibre. Note not all combinations supported.
Re:How does it help? (Score:5, Interesting)
Qi has already won. Almost all wirelessly charged devices use the Qi standard, especially phones. Qi has the advantage of not requiring any data transfer, so the "free" chargers in coffee shops don't get to spy on you. Receivers can be extremely simple and retro-fitted to almost anything that uses USB for charging.
The other guys have lost, this is just their way of buying in to the winning standard while maintaining their contracts with people like Starbucks. What worries me is that those contracts may require future standards to log unique IDs as the competing wireless charging systems already do. No thanks.
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F**king magnets, how do they work?
Doesn't include Qi (Score:3, Insightful)
Except the catch is that it doesn't include the Wireless Power Consortium who makes Qi. Without Qi you still pretty much have two standards, it just seems that the the rest of the industry has banded together to fight the one standard that has actually been shipping on devices.
Although now that qualcomm quick charge 2.0 is shipping in devices I will no longer care about wireless charging until it is much faster.
doesn't need to be faster (Score:2)
couple things:
* you need to buy a quality Qi charger. Lots of the cheap ones on Amazon are aweful. Having purchased 11 and shipped back 7 to Amazon, I personally recommend the Gmyle Qi black pad, but they are out of stock of the microUSB port one in black (useful if you want to rapid charge faster). A good charger does 750mA screen on, 1A screen off. There are some apps with the ability to monitor current draw, set to log when screen off so you can track performance. Many of the cheaper chargers will start
Re: doesn't need to be faster (Score:2)
your current solution of just using the quick charge still wears out the microUSB port
one of the clever things about MicroUSB is that the wear parts are in the cable, not the port. Most people won't ever use up the 10,000 or so insertions they're rated for.
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no, female side definitely still wears
Palm Pre (Score:2)
And yet none of the current wireless chargers are as good as the ones for my Palm Pre (6 years ago). You didnt need a car mount with the pre charger...
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#WirelessPowerMatters to align with recent social media promotion trends.
FM reception (Score:2)
I had one of those wireless chargers on my desk, but that completly broke FM radio reception. (streaming is no option due to company security policies)
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I have a cheap chinese one on my desk that works just fine and isn't affecting anything.
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I had those effects with both a (I guess also cheap chinese) qi-compliant and a high-end apple mouse charger.
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The cheap [amzn.com] (~$10) chineese chargers = no interference, but you really need a 3A supply if you are going to use it with GPS on and hope to keep your device at least even on power. I bought 2 because the first one didn't use a micro usb input which meant I had to have an extra cable if I wanted to directly connect for a faster charge.
The expensive OWL charger ($50 and also not mini or micro usb) which I got for my dad as a present totally messes up the radio and only comes w
The two groups which nobody uses decide to merge (Score:2, Insightful)
qi FTW!
Great news for early adopters (Score:5, Funny)
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Which is why you never adopt early. I mean, what is this... amateur hour?!
The names remind me of Monty Python (Score:2)
Off topic, but I believe comical enough given the name similarities of the organizations...
From Life of Brian:
Brian: Excuse me. Are you the Judean People's Front?
Reg: Fuck off! 'Judean People's Front'. We're the People's Front of Judea! 'Judean People's Front'.
Francis: Wankers.
Figures (Score:2)
It figures that this news comes out now. Yesterday I ordered 3 QI receivers for my family's Galaxy S4 phones and 8 charging pads to charge them and two other tablets. I'll eventually get to toss em on on the pile of technology I was on the losing side of, next to the HD-DVDs, plasma screen, Betamax player...
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It would also mean we could use LED lighting without needing an AC/DC converter in each damn light "bulb". At the very least we should have sockets with a built-in AC/DC converter and use regular LED lights made for RVs or something.
Wireless charging should be banned (Score:3)
Wireless charging is less effective than charging with a physical connection, meaning there is wasted energy in the process.
I don't know if you noticed but the whole planet is going at war over sources of energy.
Wasting energy just so it's a little less annoying to recharge toys is just plain stupid.
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>Wasting energy just so it's a little less annoying to recharge toys is just plain stupid.
FWIW, for many people this decision is about device wear and tear more than convenience. If you've ever had to replace the USB connector on your phone or had the USB connector fail and your device nearly go up in smoke (often when you hear reports of phones catching fire it's because the USB cable or the USB connector in the phone wore out, shorted inside the connector and overheated) then you might be a little more
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That means we need better USB connectors, not wireless charging.
Also, why not make a standard connector at the bottom of smartphones, like those on wireless phones? It works for those phones, why not smartphones? The hardest part would be to get Apple on-board with the idea but there's that's not an engineering problem since it's already been done and we know it works. Put your smartphone on a charging station/dock, done. It's easier than connecting a wire and there's no losses like wireless power transmiss
SAR (Score:1)
I'm curious if this technology could cause people who are sensitive to SAR radiation have the same issue. I've known a few people who would get pretty severe head aches from using certain cell phones.
Seems like it could happen with all the extra spilling in the air around people...
Those who aren't familiar:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_absorption_rate