New Products Usher in Age of Wireless Power

We like to think we live in a wireless world. After all, the air we breathe is absolutely packed with a spectrum of radio, TV, Bluetooth, WiFi, and all sorts of other invisible waves that bring sight and sound to our electronics.

But how wireless is our world, really? We take it for granted that every electronic gadget requires power, and that typically means wires: wires that get lost, tangled, and create aesthetically unpleasing clutter.

Two forthcoming products suggest that the world of wireless power may be a step closer.

First, a little background. When it comes to wireless power, there are two main ways of doing it: conductive and inductive.

With conductive power, electricity is sent from a charger to a device through metal contacts. This is cool and already available on a few devices (WildCharge Inc. sells conductive pads and adaptors that work with some cell phones and game controllers).

Inductive power, on the other hand, uses magnetic coils to send power short distances through the air. This technology is already used in electric toothbrushes, but current applications are only able to provide a slow trickle of power without overheating — toothbrushes typically need to be docked overnight in order to squeeze just a few minutes of brush time out of them.

Built In

That’s why the forthcoming Powermat, developed by New York- based start-up Powermat Ltd. with a promised 2009 commercial release, is so exciting. The Powermat is an inductive charging pad that, when used with a series of adaptors, purports to charge devices faster than their traditional chargers. According to the company, the technology can even provide enough power to fuel kitchen appliances.

Still, the final goal for any wireless charging application is to have the technology built directly into gadgets.

Enter the Palm Pre mobile phone, which will be available on the Sprint network in the first half of 2009. The Pre is the first major consumer electronics device to feature an inductive coil built right in. While customers can still charge this phone through a regular cord, an optional accessory called the Touchstone makes it unnecessary. The Pre can be charged

just by leaving it on the puck-like pad (which, of course, must still be plugged in.)

Standards

This is a big deal. With the Pre and Touchstone, Sunnyvale, California-based Palm Inc. has essentially taken wireless charging beyond the realm of toothbrushes and little-known start-ups, and firmly into the mainstream gadget world. The Pre is receiving a lot of pre-release buzz, and is likely to be a hit.

Once this significant base of customers sees how cool it is to wirelessly charge their Pre, they’re going to want more, and other gadget manufacturers should follow suit with their own built-in inductive coils.

Palm could even conceivably build an inductive coil into small accessories such as Bluetooth headsets, allowing users to charge them on their Touchstone next to a Pre. While the Touchstone and Powermat are incompatible with each other (meaning gadgets designed for one won’t work on the other), I have hope that manufacturers will settle on standards — if they want the technology to take off, they may have to.

Coffee Shops

The true potential for inductive charging is so much greater. For now, these devices are more cool than practical. After all, you still need to plug the charging mats into a wall. Down the line, the technology could be built directly into tabletops, allowing users to leave their gadgets anywhere on a table without thinking about it. This would be a useful feature in corporate conference room tables, coffee shops and cafes.

While inductive power is transferred through the air, current applications require gadgets and their chargers to be so close that they might as well be touching. Researchers at MIT and Intel have succeeded in beaming inductive power several feet through the air.

In the future, merely walking into a room may be enough for our gadgets to soak up power, negating the need to ever think about charging them, ever again. Then we will be living in a truly wireless world.

(Seth Porges is an editor for Popular Mechanics and a columnist for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Seth Porges at seth.c.porges@gmail.com