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Wireless Charging Standards Groups Agree To Merge
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.
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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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".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
F**king magnets, how do they work?
John
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.
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...
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.
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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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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.
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)
bickerdyke
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.
qi FTW!
It means that regardless of which alliance you got behind your tech is now obsolete.
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.
#WirelessPowerMatters to align with recent social media promotion trends.
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.
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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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Consumers won't care the slightest
What?
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...
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 very used to it. For example, I have wireless charging installed\hacked into my car. I get into my car and slap my phone onto my magnetic wireless charging mount (which is a Mountek magnetic mount with a Nexus Qi charger attached. The phone is Nexus 5). I don't have to adjust the mount to grab the phone (no grips, just magnets!) and I don't have to plug anything in. Within half a second, the phone is charging and mounted, and it charges at a fast enough rate that even with screen on and GPS active, the phone charge level is ticking upwards. When I leave my car, I just grab the phone. No fussing with cables or the mount. Awesome. Fast. Convenient. I'm living in the future.
I also have a Nexus Qi charger on my bedside table. With this, I never have to retrieve a cable that's fallen to the ground, and never have to drag a cable across the bed over a sleeping partner. It charges my phone all night, I wake up with a full charge, and it's easy, so I don't give a damn if some energy is lost. It's very effective for me.
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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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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.
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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.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
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 at 1A but after a weak peter out to 400mA or so which, I agree, is too slow. Usually replacing the wall-wart with a solid supply is all that's necessary, or just buy a better Qi charger.
* you have one at your desk at work, and at home at your computer, and by your night stand. For $10 each that's cheap convenience. You leave it on the pad any time you're at the station.
* your current solution of just using the quick charge still wears out the microUSB port. I mounted a pad inside the CD tray of my car using rubber feet as guides. Pretty convenient, but most trips are short enough that I need to use a rapid charger.
Just seems a bit paranoid to me. Also, I'm sure there are good points to using data aside from privacy implications.
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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