2010 Is The Power Revolution

There was a subtheme to this years CES event. With everyone focusing on devices there’s a greater need to keep them powered and two noteworthy bits of news were shown. The first involves charging your devices without plugging it in and the second doesn’t even need a wall outlet to keep you going.

The first is from the Wireless Power Consortium that is promising that it will agree on a charging standard by mid-year. What this means is that your phone’s battery will have circuitry in it that will let you just drop your phone on a mat and charge without plugging it into usb or a similar wire. The other benefit is that you can drop a few devices on one mat. This is similar to the Powermat which is already available but the difference is that it will work for all devices and by standardizing it you should be able to go anywhere and find a charge.

That’s good and dandy but why even use a mat when you can just harvest the wifi energy around you? RCA is showing off a usb dongle that converts wifi to power. And beyond this, they are talking about a battery with this built in so that your phone can always be drawing a charge from thin air. They claim to have charged a Blackberry in 90 minutes from 30% to a full charge. Very impressive and they’re looking at a mere $40 for the usb dongle and matching OEM prices on the battery prices. The charging time will vary depending on wifi signal strength. This sounds like a slam dunk when it’s available. Check it out: