Wireless charging – with wires
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
I thought I’d stumbled onto a great piece of tech in the Powermat but digging a little deeper I’m not so sure. So what is the Powermat? Powermat is a device that allows you to wirelessly charge devices like mobile phones and portable gaming devices on a magnetic ‘board’ which can take up to 3 devices at a time.
Now as long as you have an iPhone, Nintendo DS or a Blackberry this is true but for most other devices you have to use something called a ‘Universal Powercube Receiver’ which is basically a small box that contains lots of different adapters for various devices. Ok so looking at this there are only actually 3 types of device which are fully wirelessly supported – 4 Blackberry phones, iPhone/iPod touch and the Nintendo DS lite/DSi so if you have to plug in a device to then place on the mat using the Powercube couldn’t you just save yourself a ton (£69.99 for the home and office Powermat and a further £29.99 for any of the charging devices) and use the provided cable?
I’m struggling to see where it has merit but also I don’t want this article to sound like a drubbing. Say there are 3 people in your office all with iPhone or Blackberrys (all be it limited on the Blackberry models) and you all chuck in for the mat and 3 charging cases then you’ll all pay around £63 for the ability to charge your device wirelessly. Alternatively I did look how much a second charger for each of these units would be; it’s less than £15 for an iPhone charger and for a compatible charger for the Blackberry and DS its £4! So again where’s the merit? To me it just looks like a big boy’s toys.
Personally I feel if they had waited a year or so and spoken to manufacturers about incorporating the technology into the devices it would be a far superior product. At work myself, having a HTC phone, I can use a bog standard USB 2 A to mini B lead directly from my PC with the added bonus of being able to plug lots of other things into it also. This type of cable comes with lots of modern devices and if you work in a tech environment I’m sure you have a bunch knocking about the office.
Hopefully a couple of years down the line it will be a larger part of mobile devices and I can see Powermats on boardroom tables throughout the world after all the ‘jet set’ businessman would breath a huge sigh of relief, I’m sure, if he could go into a meeting and just drop his phone onto a Powermat to charge without having to look for the correct attachment. If you still like the idea you can pick one up from here
