Tech knowledge #7

THE TRUTH ABOUT XIAOMI'S "AIR CHARGING"

So, Xiaomi just announced what kind of seems like the biggest leap in smartphones for the last decade.

I'm not even exaggerating they built a wireless power station which can charge your phone over the air such that you'd never need to plug it into anything again 

It basically figures out where your phone is within a room and then it fires a narrow beam towards it which can be converted by the phone into charge well that's amazing

Other Companies that have tried this and failed.

We've had Y charge which called itself the future of power not to mention whose concept was almost identical to the one Xiaomi's just released none of them have worked .

Why did Xiaomi did it??

Well! because air charging is hard even with this Xiaomi one the power limit per device is kept at five watts 

Five watts is the amount of power that the original I phone from 2007 charged with.

and in a market  where phones with the cables are hitting 120 watts funnily enough actually a lot of them are Xiaomi's own phones this is going to feel slow it's the smartphone equivalent of trying to fill up a bottle while the lid's still on but that's the start of it you see for this to actually work you need not just the base station but also you need a phone that has a beacon antenna that is active allthe time to constantly communicate with the base station to make sure it know where to fire the beam of charge but also 14 other antennae just to be able to convert that air charge into actual battery juice so straight away just the very method by which this works it completely wipes away the possibility of this working with your existing phone but probably also be any phone that's not a Xiaomi phone plus just having all of these antennae active all the time raises another concern.

See the biggest existing problem with the current standard of wireless charging is the fact that it's super inefficient like compared to a cable which is directly connecting the power source via a highly conductive metal everytime you try and charge through one of the pads that the energy has to pass through not just the metal but almost always a sheet of plastic from the charger and the sheet of glass on the back of your phone and these are not highly conductive materials and so as a result much less of the energy you put in actually ends up as charge on your  phone and much more of it ends up as heat which is  which is not just a complete waste of resources but is also actively bad for your battery's health. 

Well  air charging is even more wasteful because as well as all of the inefficiencies of normal wireless charging we've now got to use even more energy to not just locate and keep track of  where the  phone is but also potentially to fire this beam across five meters worth of air and all of this is not even factoring in that the charging station is the size of fridge the fact that it probably cost as much as your phone itself to buy potential health concerns and the simple fact that this was not a product announcement this was not Xiaomi saying hey here's the thing you can pre-order it at this state all of this was Xiaomi saying we're working on it.

The exact same way we saw their mix alpha which never came out the same way we saw their triple folding phone wherever that is the same way as the Apple's air power which was shown off proudly to the world only then for them to realize :

1. It isn't coming 

I highly doubt that this commercial is anything you are able to buy globally but

2. I'm really glad 

That Xiaomi has announced this.

We've seen this type of charging before and even though it hasn't been successful. 

The simple fact that it's Xiaomi who's announced that they're working on it instead of some small kickstarter firm is in itself a big news because Xiaomi is one of the few companies around the world who actually has the scale and the money to it properly and if you wanted any indication that this could be about to become a huge trend. Literally hours after Xiaomi announced that they were working on this Motorola just came and said, "Hey we're working on it too and i could bet my bottom dollar that they are not the only one's but also Xiaomi's taken it further than anyone else See their charging station can actually charge multiples devices at the same time.

Cool!!

But not just that even more significantly they're saying it doesn't matter if other objects come in the way now this is kind of confusing because this whole air charging thing is based on the same milimeter waves in the 5g and is definately affected with interfering objects so if Xiaomi have actually figured a way to get around this then fair play to them  And this whole big problem of the charging power being kept at 5 watt the more i think about it the more i realize it might not be a problem remember because you're not actively having to plug your phone into a wall or put it on to a pad where it might restrict how you can use it you can effectively carry on using it like normal while the battery slowly trickles up and so it almost doesn't matter if it's slow because you don't have to do anything now i can already hear it there is a group of you reading this article thinking that it's GREAT. 

But why you would'nt all of this R&D have been better spent figuring out out  a way to recycle batteries better is the entire process of all of this just to literally save me the seconds it takes me to plug my phone in I'd rather not get blasted with yet more radiation.

Thank you very much i will stick to my cables and you would have a point i mean to be clear the radiation that is being given off here is NON-Ionising that it's very unlikely thatit's going to start destroying cells in your body like sitting next to an x-ray machine might but to some extent this is untested territory as this is using the same milimeter wave technology as a 5g base station and so whilst it's not of course at nearly the same scale i can understand the concern especially if you are going to be sitting right next to it for 10 hours a day so let's wait and see what kind of safety features are announced but i just want to leave you with one thought.

One thing that I think is the most interesting aspect of this is that when air charging gets better, now that a company like Xiaomi investing heavily in it I've got no doubt that it will get better we're not gonna need batteries anymore it will start with low power devices that you only keep in your home like TV remotes like smart speakers but soon enough I've got no doubt that SMART BANDS and even SMARTPHONES will start either massively shrinking the amount of battery they come with just keeping it as like a backup reserve or just getting rid of battery entirely maybe that's longer term and this is better new than it sounds batteries are not just one  extra component that we end up having to pay for on a phone but they're also the main contributor towards both thickness and weight and batteries are the main reason that we have to keep swapping every phone in couple of years they're the fastest degrading component.

So, there you have it air charging very possibly the future but the real turning point will come when a big company announces  that they've got retail ready version of this