Apple may have struggled to make its AirPower charging pad work for multiple devices, but just over the horizon is a new technology that promises to make wireless charging truly wireless, and Xiaomi is the newest company to promise a world without charging cables – we just don’t know when it will actually arrive.
Wireless charging in its current form is certainly useful as it allows you to place a device such as a smartphone or headphones on a pad to top up the battery without having to reach for a cable. But at the same time it is also restrictive, requiring you to leave a device on a desk or side table almost until it’s charged. True wireless charging is the ideal solution because as long as you are in the same room as a wireless power transmitter, your phone will charge anywhere, even if you are still using it in your hand.
It sounds like total science fiction, but the technology exists, and in 2016 a company called That is demonstrated working prototypes of its Cota wireless charging system at CES. A smartphone (upgraded with special case) can be transported anywhere in the booth of the company and recharge indefinitely. Today Xiaomi announced its own wireless charging ecosystem called “Mi Air Charge Technology” which appears to offer similar functionality (and limitations) to Ossia’s Cota technology.
Rather than wires or a pair of aligned magnetic coils, Mi Air Charge uses a transmitter (roughly the size of a portable air conditioner) full of antennas that both accurately locate a device and then use beamforming to produce “millimeter-wide waves” towards it. A separate smaller collection of antennas acts as a receiver in another device, converting the wireless signals into about 5 watts of power, which the iPhone’s little cube charger provided when plugged into an electrical outlet.
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Xiaomi promises that the system can simultaneously supply power to multiple devices, be it a smartphone, a tablet, a pair of headphones or even a few wirelessly powered batteries such as Ossia also demonstrated a few years ago, which ensures that older devices never need a new pair. Distances are still limited to a few feet, or about the size of an average room, but the technology isn’t hindered by physical obstructions, so the rugged power transmitter can potentially be hidden from view.
It’s exciting to see more companies announcing these types of wireless charging solutions as it helps legitimize the technology, but unfortunately, to date all we really have is announcements. Since its debut at CES 2016, Ossia has still not launched a wireless charging product available to consumers. And Xiaomi’s announcement today doesn’t even contain vague promises as to how long it will take the company to make its Mi Air Charge technology available outside of its own R&D labs.
There are significant challenges to making this technology both safe and reliable, and unfortunately it is not backward compatible. In the future, Xiaomi could include the compact antenna-receiver array in its future smartphones, but your iPhone will not work with the system without a special charging case, or Apple agrees to play nice with Xiaomi. There’s no question that true wireless charging will one day become common – we can even power entire cities wirelessly instead of having a transmitter in every room of a house – but for now, it still remains nothing more than a tantalizing technical demo.