Wireless charging is a very interesting technology that hasn’t taken off as many would want. It is nothing new, but until recent times it was more expensive than regular charging methods to be implemented into consumer products. It works with a transmitter and a receiver that generate electricity through a magnetic field. Some improvements have been done recently to improve the speed of charging a certain device and reduce the loss of energy transferred by using very thin coils and higher frequencies.
Many smartphones and more recently smartwatches support this technology, or some need an additional hardware to support it, but most users still aren’t able to see the advantages as the charging pads include a cable that are still plugged into a wall, I mean, there’s the convenience of not having to find the charging port on the phone and connect a cable directly to it, but that doesn’t seem like a game-changing advantage. The real advantage would be when more furniture start integrating this technology, IKEA already has created some and get to a restaurant or a coffee shop and just take out your phone, place it in the table and it gets charged without carrying extra cables or finding the closest electrical output.
The advantage is very clear, so perhaps we could see it implemented in all kinds of electronics, perhaps portable projectors or laptops. Google is aware of this and has registered a patent for small coils that could fit into single keys from a standard keyboard of a laptop, or in Google’s case, a Chromebook. These coils could act as receivers to charge the device or as transmitters, so the larger battery included in these devices could be used to charge some smaller ones like phones. The advantage of having these coils to fit into the keys is that they would be repaired easily as they would be more accessible, although it would be weird to try to charge a phone as it would block some parts of the keyboard. Still this is just a patent and it could be a while before it gets implemented into an actual consumer electronic, if it ever does.