Today, smartphones are becoming a necessity in people’s day to day life. And as smartphone demand increases, various technologies are coming out to allow an easy charging for users. One of the biggest changes in smartphone technology is the long-awaited addition of wireless charging. Wireless charging is the latest technology used by smartphone manufacturers to make quick and easy unplugged charging.
Wireless charging generally uses an electromagnetic field to transfer energy between two objects through electromagnetic induction. Put simply, this enables you to charge your phone or device without actually plugging it in, you simply place your phone on a charging pad, and the phone is charged without any wired connection. Basically, wireless charging uses two resonant inductive couplings to transmit low-power signals between two devices. The base station has a transmitter coil, and your phone has a receiver coil. The base station regularly sends a signal out, and when a receiver coil gets close enough, then the resonance or capacity change happens in the signal. The waveform of the signal is then modulated and so inductive charging begins.
As of today, there are several different types of wireless charging available in the market, and the three most common ones are Qi (from the Wireless Power Consortium), PMA (from the Power Matters Alliance) and A4WP (from the Alliance for Wireless Power).
Apple has already announced that the iPhone uses the Qi wireless charging technology and knowing Apple as one of the leaders in Smartphone technology, it’s likely that it will become the market leader compared to the other two and that is why most companies use Qi.
Over the past six years, more and more phone brands have adopted wireless charging. Google, LG, and Samsung have all launched smartphones with wireless charging over the years, and now, of course, Apple with its newly released iPhone 8 and iPhone X both featuring the Qi wireless charging standard.
It is pretty obvious that wireless charging has now infiltrated the smartphone market and more and more phone brands are embracing this very convenient technology within their designs. It’s fair to say that wireless charging has definitely entered the mainstream.