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Patent: Wireless iPhone Charging Station?

ammonihah99 said:
If the iPhone will be able to charge and/or transmit data from a few meters away, how far away are we from having one central power source in the home and all appliances and electronic devices are powered wirelessly from that? Electric receptacles would be a thing of the past. It might be expensive, but would it be feasible?
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That would be scary. Cancer rates would sky rocket.
 
I must say, this would be awesome. I would love to just come home and drop my phone on the charger. One less thing to break, but we could also have bigger problems than we anticipate. If you could charge at a distance, say, anywhere in the same room, it would be so convenient.
 
according to vonnegut, Universal Will To Become (UWTB) could power an ipod for a millennium with a single charge.

on a semi-serious note. is this safe to have juice flying through the air???
 
Cepe Indicum said:
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not... 😱

But, just in case you're not, I changed the battery on my remote the other day... no inductive power there I'm afraid, tho it would be cool!
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I in no way thought that anything but a battery powered those remotes but to somewhat back em up... the little hide away spring action battery compartment is nice and stealthy.
 
mikeinternet said:
according to vonnegut, Universal Will To Become (UWTB) could power an ipod for a millennium with a single charge.

on a semi-serious note. is this safe to have juice flying through the air???
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not if it would work like a transformer... eletcricity is pumped into a coil where it is converted to a magnetic field... the neighboring coil converts the newly created magnetic field back into electricity and bam! FLUX BABY!

anywho... thats assuming they use that same kind of induction.
 
There are third party base stations for Portable Macs. I do not have the links. The base stations themselves have all the wires hooked to it, then you "dock" the laptop into the base.

If you have more than one or two connections you typically hook-up, or have difficulty with the connectors due to fatfingers, they are reasonable.

Rocketman
 
black plastic back in iPhone

Now I suddenly understand why the bottom back of the iPhone isn't metal: That's probably where the induction coil is...(and maybe even the removable battery?)
 
Nonoche said:
So if there's still a contact for an electrical outlet on the iPhone, then there's no point at all in the induction system, and we lose its benefits…
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Fully enclosed is a theory, not a reality, for now. Anything with adhesive seams that's mass produced is going to have minor problems with being airtight, and furthermore the iPhone has a couple physical buttons on the side, along with the SIM slot, and the USB slot for portable charging and high-speed data transfer. The technology itself allows for fully enclosed systems, but the other realities of the devices still prevent that from actually happening.

The thing is that the dock connector on most devices is an open gateway for dust. Having just a miniUSB connector on the bottom already minimizes this hazard. There's no way to introduce a device like this without the option to charge it in the "standard" way. People don't travel with docking stations for anything, so there either has to be a backup power source or a way to plug it into the wall, at least until induction technology becomes as ubiquitous as the wall sockets themselves.
 
Regarding specifically the stand-charger for what looks like a tablet PC...

I hate to say "I told you so" but...

From a previous post I made on the future of multitouch, I pointed out this is exactly the kind of solution Apple would envision: (emphasis added here to highlight the specific suggestion)

I'm talking about seeing this on, say, an iMac. Now, your first reaction might be "but iMacs are stationary and upright." This is where I'd ask you, and others here who have approached this from the negative, to think forward...

People like to say "tablet PC"... but what images does a tablet PC conjure up? Usually a single-point touchscreen which doesn't allow the user to do things remotely close to what they can do with a multitouch UI. That's why I haven't chosen to use that term directly to refer to where Apple is headed in this case.

What images does an iMac conjure up? Well, several, because iMac has gone through several logical design evolutions: CRT and computer in one case > Luxo Jr.-style LCD lamp-Mac > RoundRect all-in-one iMac (23 years and round rectangles are STILL everywhere!)

Well, how about the next iMac? Well, some people may use the upright design in a multitouch. Others might not. Solution? Make the screen/computer removable from the swivel armature. Voila... iMac/TabletMac in one.
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With this patent, the patent filing for the Piles type UI improvements, the acquisition of Fingerworks, the iPhone, Cover Flow, Spaces, Time Machine, etc. I strongly believe (though I *could* still be wrong) all roads are pointing to a product development roadmap for a multitouch Mac within the next three years.
 
Induction not the End-All, Be-All Some May Think

I, too, have one of those induction powered toothbrushes, and it's great.

Except that when it sits atop a clock radio I also keep sinkside, the reception is impossible unless I move it to a very particular spot.

Why? As earlier posters surmise, it creates a time-varying magnetic field (60 North, 60 South per second) to transfer the energy to the rechargable battery. Those fields are great for erasing floppies, and could also be a concern if you were to place your miscellaneous thumb drives, SD chips, etc on the chargerbase while it was on. Your average headphone cord would probably do a decent job of at least picking up the hum, too.

That's to recharge a battery for 5 minutes of wiggling in each 24 hours, not much energy/hour of charging. You certainly wouldn't want it strong enough to work a couple of feet away, and probably want it to detect whether the target iPhone is present before it starts humming away, too. I'm no Luddite, but more than a few inches of range and you'll start hearing scaremongering about brain tumors, etc. Nobody needs that, either.

I'd imagine that people would want to listen or even talk while the phone is on the charger, so the expected hum, as well as the potential noise/hiss of data going across, would have to be pretty carefully filtered. If this is so great, look for it on the next-gen nano, a perfect place to try out a great idea that might need some fine-tuning.
 
WaltFrench said:
Those fields are great for erasing floppies, and could also be a concern if you were to place your miscellaneous thumb drives, SD chips, etc on the chargerbase while it was on.
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Flash memory doesn't have anything to do with magnetism, so you'd be ok putting things like thumb drives and SD cards on the charger. You don't want floppy or hard disk drives close, though.
 
Gimzotoy said:
Flash memory doesn't have anything to do with magnetism, so you'd be ok putting things like thumb drives and SD cards on the charger. You don't want floppy or hard disk drives close, though.
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What about having your wallet with your credit cards near it? Say in your pocket, or on your belt in some sort of holder? 😕
 
That's an interesting point I never thought of. Should such an inductive charger be integrated into a desk, be sure not to sit your wallet on it!

If it's enough to wipe out a floppy drive like a previous poster suggests, it's surely enough to wipe out your mag stripes. You'd only have to worry about the charger itself though. The actual device would not be any danger to your credit cards when it's not charging.
 
WaltFrench said:
Those fields are great for erasing floppies, and could also be a concern if you were to place your miscellaneous thumb drives, SD chips, etc on the chargerbase while it was on. Your average headphone cord would probably do a decent job of at least picking up the hum, too.

That's to recharge a battery for 5 minutes of wiggling in each 24 hours, not much energy/hour of charging. You certainly wouldn't want it strong enough to work a couple of feet away, and probably want it to detect whether the target iPhone is present before it starts humming away, too.
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Microwaves work better. I wonder how the FCC and CPSC feels about those?

Remember when Moscow was irradiating Washington DC back in the mid-80's?

Rocketman
 
I like the idea of induction for charging a device's battery. But it's true that the range of thing should be extremely small, else you'll kill hard drives, floppies, tapes, watches etc. Oh yea, your whole body will get microwaved a little too... you don't want that.

Charging the iPhone by placing it into a dock where the coils in the dock can surround the coils in the phone should work fine and have minimal magnetic annoyances. But you could as well just have something like a magsafe connector where the phone basically snaps in.

But the sheer fact that people want to use their phone while it's charging and the iPhone has a dock connector (at least the prototype has one) leeds me to the conclusion that everything will happen through the cable, just as an iPod.
 
Wireless!

This is so sweet! Pretty soon they're gonna make it so you don't even have to plug in your computer to get on the internet. They'll call it wireless internet! Oh wait...😎
 
I want to know what the induction would do to my body....

will it help my body produce ATP so I don't have to eat anymore? What if they made a blanket out of it? Ultra power naps?
 
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