Next-gen Qi2 wireless charging spec seeded by Apple The Wireless Power Consortium (WPC) on Tuesday announced a new wireless charging standard called Qi2, claiming that the spec will "unify the industry under one global standard." And to make that claim convincing, the WPC said Apple – a leading player in the mobile industry and known for borking standards to cash in – has …
In what world? How quickly do you need to charge something that has a battery that already lasts all day unless you are literally on your phone all day?
Samsung has a 30W wireless charging system, so it is possible to charge faster. It is just mostly pointless.
Heck, I still use one of the original 5W USB-A charging bricks to charge my 14 Pro Max. It is charging when I sleep (every other night, because it only gets down to maybe 65% after one day's use for me) so why should I care how long it takes to charge? Slower charging is better for the battery, so there's no benefit to charging faster unless you have very limited time in which to do so.
I do have one of Apple's USB-C charging bricks that is 15W, I believe. I put that in my travel bag, figuring that if I ever get stuck in an airport for a day and have a short time to top up that's when I could use a faster charge.
Playing dumb.
phones arent phones alone. But very powerful computers with extra energy sapping stuff like 5G and SatNav.
I have a iPhone 12 mini as a backup that wont even make it half a day if used a lot. If I go into airplane mode, the battery lasts for days.
You can buy a dumb phone which lasts like a 2000's phone - even some with Google Play Store.
Size is the real issue. The phones feel like carrying round a sideboard nowadays.
Flexi screens that roll out like the LG Italy one a few months back.
I have a cheap refurbished Xiaomi Redmi 4X with a custom ROM (crDroid, still getting OTA updates, last was on the 17th of December!) with very little on it, essentially just my SIM card from work and some basic things like Microsoft authenticator.
I have had over 2 weeks of battery life, 10 days being entirely normal. Yeah, basically just standby, apart from receiving MFA prompts a few times each day, but it is possible. Most phones have too much in the background talking back and forth, updating this and that.
We keep getting sold phones with bigger and faster everything, only for them to be bloated down with horrendous software tracking your every move and draining your battery.
A couple of things.
1 - data EATS power. The quicker the transmission, the more power it needs which is why 5G is not really wonderful if you want a battery to last. You can see that for yourself: switch the phone to 3G and see just how much longer the battery lasts. If your main data use of the phone is just email you can leave it at that and it'll last a lot longer. Anything synchronous like FaceTime or other data based voice will also work, but video won't, and surfing will be a pain (something I never use my phone for as I can't filter ads well enough there). Personally I wish there was a way to make the phone only switch to 4/5G when one of these fast services would need it.
2 - making calls also needs power, and the further you are away from a mast the more power it needs to transmit. If you're one of the people who professionally has to make a lot of calls you too won't last the day with any sort of battery. A phone which could handle that for a full day would be twice as thick to make space for the battery you'd need.
The latter is where wireless charging is really helpful because you can set up a wireless cradle for the phone to live on between calls - correcting it up to a wire every time would wear out the socket.
The iPhone have several options, one being "5G Auto: Enables Smart Data mode. When 5G speeds don’t provide a noticeably better experience, your iPhone automatically switches to LTE, saving battery life." and another one: "5G On: Always uses 5G network when it’s available. This might reduce battery life.". Android probably got something similar in phone Settings.
I'm not exactly sure how "5G Auto" works though, haven't tried comparing it to "5G On". We don't have mmWave where I live only up to 3.5GHz and the phone battery seem to last for days.
Well that's your use case. I do have to charge my phone during the day because I use it (for work!) all day. It charges slowly during the night on a "fast charger" because Optimised Battery Charging is on. But if I need to charge it during the day, I'm glad it's back to 80% in 10 minutes before I'm out again. And I'm guessing I'm not the only user who values this. So why leave out the port?
You may not use your phone much (I fall into that category too), but there are people who are on the move all the time, taking Zoom calls on their phone, typing out emails, reports and PowerPoint presentations. These people may have only half an hour in an airport lounge to get their phone from 5% to 80% battery in time for their next long-haul flight. So, for these people 15W charging is not enough. These people have a choice with Lightning/USB-C to charge faster, but if Apple removes all physical ports, then they have no option at all. And that is why, faster and more efficient wireless charging standards are important - you specifically may not need it, but a lot of other people do.
My phone, with USB C, is already waterproof enough - it shrugs off accidental drops in puddles or its owner falling into a canal.
Also, there is no inherent reason why a port would allow water to ingress further into the phone than it would otherwise. A port is just some bits of metal embedded in some polymer.
That said, though I don't currently use wireless charging, I wouldn't buy a phone without it. Why? Because if I ever did damage the USB port, wireless charging would allow me to keep using an otherwise functional phone. Redundancy. You can buy some USB C / Lightening / 3.5mm blanking caps from your shopping website of choice.
I accidentally dropped my phone in the toilet literally the day I bought it (which was thankfully flushed). It being an iPhone 13 it just resulted in a backlit toilet, the phone didn't seem to care. I fished it out, rubbed it dry with a towel and it's still working happily.
It doesn't even smell of Harpic :).
"Wireless charging is significantly less efficient than charging via wire, requiring as much as 50 percent more energy by some measures."
Shirley all the greenaholics should be whining about how wireless charging is destroying the climate/environment? Why the deafening silence on the subject?
>whining about how wireless charging is destroying the climate/environment?
And to continue your pot stirring: every power supply with outputs accessible to the consumer, has an air gap (or some other equivalent insulator). So the wired chargers are all already, internally, wireless.
>Why the deafening silence
Because it's hardly a priority. And the savings made by avoiding all the wires is probably greater.
The 5G issue is bigger.
https://enpowered.com/how-energy-efficient-is-5g/
The 50% is already clickbait but charging efficiency for mobile phones isn't really a problem. If you do the maths for a household charging its phones once a day you'll see this dwarfed by other household devices, especially anything that heats water. No, mobile devices themselves don't really cause problems, as evinced by their spread around the world even in areas with poor capacity, but they do act as a "pull" for more energy intensive data centres and networks to provide them all with content.
They're already several existing projects for this but losses are probably lower due to the larger surface area and lower losses in the transformer. It's possible also to optimise transmission losses by using movable pads but the most important thing will be requiring the power to come from renewable sources (closed-loop systems become more viable as the cost of grid power rises).
USB-C charging is compulsory: this is the response. I was downvoted for suggesting that the response to the EU requirement that charging must use USB-C would be increased push to wireless charging. Dunno why: no explanation was given. From where I stand, this was entirely predictable.
If Apple does move to a black monolith without any ports, it's because they think there's more money in it for them, not because of how good or bad USB-C or Lightning are or are perceived to be.
Meanwhile, in the real world, what exactly is wrong with USB-C that means it's good enough for laptops and tablets but not good enough for phones? USB-C is better in every way that counts - USB-C's better for charging than Lightning and is faster at data transfer than Lightning.
How does this artificial divide benefit the people who have bought an iPhone? No idea. I'd need to be some Apple fanboy to understand why.
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