Ikea’s new wireless-charging furniture line takes a big step toward the promise of walking through your front door, placing your phone on a normal-looking table, and effortlessly recharging your phone
IKEA and the Wireless Power Consortium partnered to unveil a small line of non-techy looking bedside tables, lamps, and charging plates with Qi chargers built into the surface, compatible with 80 or so smartphone models designed to work with the wireless charging technology (including the latest Nokia and Google Nexus models) and scheduled for sale this April.
Note: Apple and Samsung devices do not yet support Qi charging out of the box, so for now a number of users will continue plugging in to charge each evening at our desks or bedside tables.
when that furniture–a range of tables, lamps, desks, and standalone charging pads–comes from a company with the reach and design sense of Ikea. Recharging your phone no longer becomes an “activity,” it’s just something that happens whenever you set it down.
There are still plenty of limitations though. The new Ikea pieces are closer to that “every surface is a charger” ideal, but they still need to be plugged in. You also can’t use it to charge all of your gear; the Wireless Power Consortium, which developed the Qi standard, says its transmitters are all 5W models, good enough for charging up a phone. 7.5W and 15W transmitters are in production—more useful for faster phone charging and charging tablets—but the kind of firepower needed to charge a laptop is still a ways off.
But we applaud IKEA’s effort to inch us ever so closer to a life with one less wire to worry about.
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