Wireless charging is less fussy, but still a work in progress

24 February 2018 by Steve Blum
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One of my goals for CES was to see if wireless charging technology is ready for mainstream consumer adoption. The answer is yes if you’re making contact with a charging pad, but only maybe if you’re not.

Charging pads, of one kind or another, were easy to find at CES. Near field charging – putting a gizmo in direct contact with a wireless charging device – appears to be a maturing technology. Although the Qi standard is gaining – Samsung, LG and Apple support it in some of their models – compatibility is still an issue. There’s no universal solution yet for wirelessly charging your smartphone or wearable device, in the same way that pretty much anything with a wire can plug into a USB outlet. That’s more of an issue for public spaces, though. Consumers can buy what they need to do what they want.

Wireless charging at a distance, though, is more challenging. I saw two companies that claimed to have technology that would allow contactless charging. The most aggressive claim came from Powercast, a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based company that says its FCC-approved technology can deliver upwards of 100 milliwatts – enough for many wearables, if not for a smartphone – at distances of 1 to 3 feet. Very low power, Internet-of-things devices can be charged up to 80 feet away, according to company staff.

I’m cautious about accepting wireless charging performance claims at face value, mainly because of the second company, Energous. Two years ago, it exhibited a prototype that company executives said would work at distances up to 15 feet. And maybe it would, although I didn’t see them actually do it. It ended up on the scrap heap because the company couldn’t get technical approval from the FCC. It used the same 5 GHz band as WiFi devices, and blasting out multiple watts of radio frequency energy into that spectrum would be sure to interfere with data transmissions.

Energous has backed off from those claims, though. The company recently received FCC approval for technology that also has a 3-foot range. It hasn’t been rolled into a product yet, so there was no demo or prototype on display at CES, but company staff at the show expect that manufacturers will adopt the technology and integrate it into products by the end of the year.

We’ll see.