Thursday 4th March 2010

Power Pad Wireless Charging system

The Power Mat costs €89.90 and the Power Cube accessory cost €39.90 and are available from The Carphone Warehouse.

With so many electronic devices in our houses these days, chances are you have a nest of wires and cables in some corner, attached to chargers for mobiles, games and cameras.

So are there any ways to cut down on this tangle?

Some houses can have five or six mobile phones, along with a couple of digital cameras, handheld games, laptops and MP3 player etc- all of them using rechargable batteries, and you end up with a drawer full of charges and transformers and a big tangle of wires.

And the problem has mostly been because all of these devices use different types of chargers. At least once a day people go around the office looking for a "skinny Nokia charger" or a Samsung or another exotic device because their battery is draining.

One solution I'm looking at is the Power Mat Wireless Charger, which is available from The Carphone Warehouse.

It looks like a shrunken down skateboard with no wheels, but offers the ability to charge up to 3 devices wirelessly.

Now the packaging claims it is "revolutionary" but the process involved - that of magnetic induction, the principle behind this was first discovered in 1831 by Faraday, and its the same type of charging that your electric toothbrush uses. You'll notice that there are no metal contacts between your toothbrush and and its charger, and for good safety reasons on a bathroom sink. It uses magnetic induction along with their own technology which uses an electromagnetic field to transfer energy between two objects.

This was a big hit when it was shown at the Consumer Electronics Show last year in Las Vegas and is now available to purchase.

The Power Mat plugs into the power socket, and you have three points on it where you can place a device which will then take a charge.

The mat is the transmitter, but you need to buy a receiver seperately at an extra cost. This will attach to your phone or camera or whatever, and then you can place the item onto the Mat, and it gives you a little chirrup when you have placed it correctly, and the device has done an electronic "handshake", as they call it.

So, do you have to buy accessories for every individual item you want to charge?

They have focused on some special ones for the iPhone 3Gs, which is simply a jacket you slip around it, which completes the magnetic induction circuit, so you just drop the iPhone onto the mat and it powers away.

There are also some special accessories for some Blackberry's and some Nintendo DS's which replace the battery cover, and again you just place the device onto the mat, and wirelessly charge.

For other items, you have to buy what's called a Power Cube, which comes with 8 different interchangeable tips including Mini USB, Micro USB, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Nintendo DS Lite / DSi and Sony PSP.

Now your item plugs from that into the Power Cube, which then sits onto the Power Mat, so it is not fully wireless, but I suppose it reduces the amount of plugs that you would have competing for one socket.

You are also able to charge different devices with different power needs. It's able to determine what voltage your phone or mp3 or camera requires - it uses a Radio Frequency Identity Tag or RFID to determine what is being laid down to charge.

So, what are the pros and cons?

On the plus side, if you have a phone, such as an iPhone, you can just put a wireless charging jacket on it, and fill up the battery without any further plugging in.

If you have a number of devices you want charged at the one time, it reduces the mess and demand on the socket, and it can tell what voltage you need.

I would prefer if the price were less, as you could buy three regular chargers for as little as €20 each, depending on the item, but it will help tidy away some clutter, and there is a travel version of this as well, which would be particularly helpful. Rather than carry three different chargers around, you have a Power Mat that folds accross itself into a small package.

Now previously this kind of technology could lead to a loss of power, or a slower rate of charge, but developments mean this type of wireless charging can work just as quickly as plugging your mobile straight into the socket.

So, is this technology the way forward?

There are other similar products out there such as a device called eCoupled which use similar embeded technology that tells a charger what it is and how much voltage it needs.

The Palm Pre smartphone has a charger called the Touchstone which uses the same tech - you simply place your Palm Pre onto a magnetic dock which holds it in place and charges it effortlessly.

This technology could in future be embedded in walls, counter tops, or furniture to turn them into power stations to charge them.

And perhaps we will start to get some respite from the snake pit of cables after major mobile manufacturers agreed last year to harmonize phone chargers. So throughout this year, we'll be seeing mobile with mutli use Micro USB chargers which can be used on a range of mobiles from Nokia to Sony-Ericcson to Apple and more...

And these standardized data carrying cable should make up the bulk of chargers in use over the next 3 to 4 years time.