Home > News

Charging Your Devices Is About to Get a Little Easier

By Laura Tucker
Charging Your Devices Is About to Get a Little Easier Featured Image

The hangup with wireless charging is that you can’t be any great distance away from the charger. You still have to be close to the charging pad or charging system. It’s a little less hassle, as you don’t have to actually plug it in, but it’s still a hassle to have to be within a certain distance.

But the FCC has just approved a system that will allow you to be a little bit further away. It’s not across the room, but it will still give you a little more freedom.

Current Charging Options

Currently, you have four options for charging your devices.

  • Plug in to your charger
  • Wireless charging pad
  • Pi wireless charging
  • Power bank

Plugging in to your charger is self-explanatory. It’s what your device most likely ships with. It’s easy, but while your device is charging, your range is limited to the length of your power cord, and it has to stay plugged in.

A wireless charging pad isn’t truly wireless. The pad has to be plugged in to an outlet. However, your device isn’t connected to a wire and simply lies on top of the pad while it charges. You’re still limited to the length of the cord on the charging pad.

With Pi wireless charging, you don’t have to have physical contact with a pad of some sort and don’t need to be plugged in, but you have to be within a foot of it for it to work.

A power bank allows you the free range to move about at will while you charge. However, while it’s not attached to a wall outlet, it has to be attached to your device while it charges, meaning you have to carry it around. And eventually it will die and will need to be plugged in to be charged up and ready for use again.

news-easier-charging-wattup-content

Power at a Distance

Energous, a San Jose-based startup, has announced that the Federal Communications Commission has approved its wireless charger that will work from up to three feet away. It’s WattUp Mid Field transmitter will offer “power-at-a-distance” charging.

This transmitter converts electricity into radio frequencies. That energy will then be beamed to any devices within three feet that have a corresponding receiver. It’s a different resonant induction method than the Pi wireless charging system uses.

The WattUp transmitter will be able to charge multiple devices at once and should work with phones, tablets, keyboards, earbuds, etc., no matter the manufacturer. However, they need to have the right type of receiver.

The Future of Charging

Energous doesn’t have anything ready to hit the market yet at this point. However, they are going to demonstrate their power-at-a-distance charging at CES 2018 in Las Vegas in January.

Clearly the options get better as technology advances. With this charging option advancing the distance to three feet, hopefully in time we’ll be able to charge devices from across the room or even across a building or a different floor.

Will the WattUp technology make your charging experience easier? Or is it still not quite enough of a distance for you? Leave a comment down below and let us know.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

Octopuses possess roughly 500 million neurons distributed across their body, with two-thirds located in their arms rather than their central brain, meaning each arm can taste, problem-solve, and react to stimuli independently of whatever the octopus is otherwise paying attention to.
Explore the historic Roman bridge in lush Salamanca, Spain captured beautifully in daylight.
The Roman aqueduct at Segovia, built around the first century AD without mortar, still carried water into the 1970s, its 167 granite arches held together by nothing but the precise weight distribution of stones cut to fit each other within fractions of a millimeter.
When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.