Wireless connectivity is cool. It’s practical, at least in certain circumstances, but it’s cool. My Google Nexus 7 – 2013, for example, has two ports: a MicroUSB and a headphone socket. I think I’ve tried the headphone port once, to make sure that it works, but now I use a Bluetooth wireless adapter with my headphones. Likewise, I’ve used the MicroUSB port once or twice for emergency charging, but otherwise I use one of my Qi chargers dotted about my home and office. I use the built-in LTE, WiFi, Bluetooth or NFC to get information into and out of the device. The Nexus 7 is about as close to wireless as I can get it, but there are a few compromises that I must make. Firstly, recharging over the Qi wireless route takes a lot longer compared with a MicroUSB charger and secondly, the wireless transfer of large files takes some time. My home Internet connection is about half the speed I’ve seen over LTE, but it’s no where close to the theoretical transfer limits the technologies support. Bluetooth can run at around the same speed as I’ve seen my LTE connection and NFC, well that’s very slow at around 400 kilobits a second.
My story today concerns Silicon Valley startup business, Keyssa, and their Kiss Connectivity. This is a new high speed wireless transfer technology that’s been clocked as capable of 6 Gbps transfer speeds. This is faster than the current fastest USB wired specification, around 5 gigs a second. WiFi can handle up to 1.35 gigs a second (assuming there’s nothing else on that network). Keyssa’s head, Eric Almgren, demonstrated how fast Kiss Connectivity was by transferring the full 1080p version of Avatar from a Kiss-enabled hard drive to a Kiss-enabled tablet by touching the two devices and waiting five seconds. The technology has already impressed Samsung and Intel Capital, who have both backed the start up. It sounds like Keyssa’s technology can also be applied to wireless charging to enable highly efficient, fast device charging too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5p58L7azkw
Extrapolating this into the future development of mobile devices, what does this mean? It could mean thinner chassis designs as there’ll be no need for physical port, but this might mean smaller batteries and that won’t be a good thing. It’ll be easier to develop waterproof devices, or hardened devices for environments more extreme than a pocket or bag. And of course, the transfer speeds are already in excess of what we’re currently seeing Keyssa have forty people working on the project and report that there are already a number of top tier businesses testing and using the technology. They’ve bullishly announced that it’ll see service in 2015. Kiss Connectivity is much closer than we dared believe.