Xiaomi has just joined the Wireless Power Consortium which is well-known for its Qi standard. Now, most of you have probably heard of Qi wireless charger and Qi wireless charging, well, this inductive charging has been somewhat popular in the last couple of years, as a number of companies included it in their smartphones, including Samsung, LG and a number of other companies. Well, even Apple included Qi charging in its iPhone X handset which was announced yesterday, and it seems like Xiaomi’s upcoming flagship will ship with wireless charging as well, at least this new info indicates that something like that might happen.
Now, it’s worth noting that Xiaomi did not officially announce that it joined the Wireless Power Consortium, but the company is now listed on the Consortium’s website, which probably means we’ll see wireless charging in the Xiaomi Mi 7. The Xiaomi Mi 7 is expected to arrive in the first half of next year, the Xiaomi Mi 6 was announced back in April, so the Mi 7 will probably land in a similar timeframe next year. The Mi 5 and Mi 6 both sport a glass back, so including wireless charging in there should not be a problem for Xiaomi, as long as the company intends to stick to the glass back, instead of switching to metal. It’s worth noting that Qualcomm had a plan of enabling wireless charging on metal devices as well, but that plan never came to fruition, though who knows, maybe it will in the future.
Now, some of Samsung’s flagships also ship with fast wireless charging, though no matter if we’re talking about regular wireless charging or fast wireless charging, this method is slower than wired fast charging, which is one of the limitations that wireless charging currently has. Wireless charging has been available on some phones for quite some time now, but it never became extremely popular. Some people are claiming that the introduction of the iPhone X with wireless charging will help such technology and Qi charging, but considering how slow Qi charging is on the iPhone X, it remains to be seen what will happen. In any case, the Mi 7 will probably board the train and introduce wireless charging with the Mi 7, though we’ll see what will happen when the time comes.