The new Mi Air charging tech from Xiaomi.
Xiaomi
Chinese manufacturer Xiaomi is building on great sales figures in recent months with a surprise announcement that looks remarkable. It redefines wireless charging.
Well, that’s no bad thing: sometimes those products that call themselves wireless charging seem to be just like conventional charging set-ups, but with a tight magnetic connector instead of a plug-in one.
Some users of the new MagSafe system that arrived with the iPhone 12 have felt it’s no more convenient than a regular connection. After all, freeing the iPhone from the strong embrace of the charging pad is not much less work than detaching a Lightning cable.
Of course, there’s more to it than that, not least the peace of mind that you’ve put the phone down precisely enough last thing at night for your phone to be fully charged come morning. And removing iPhone from MagSafe can still be done one-handed.
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However, Xiaomi’s reveal is something quite different. Mi Air Charge Technology is an example of air charge tech. This is something that has been talked about for a while but now the revolutionary system has been turned into an actual product – though it’s not on sale yet and no date or price are yet promised.
XIaomi’s glossy Mi Air charging system.
Xiaomi
The charging station looks suitably futuristic, dressed in shiny white. It works using 144 antennas which transmit millimeter waves to a phone to recharge it. But the base and phone can be up to about 15 feet apart. So, just in the same room, then.
The phone has to be compatible and contain a special array of 14 antennas lets the base know where it is, and a rectifier circuit converts the signal into power.
You can use the phone while it’s charging – Xiaomi gives the example of gaming on the phone while it’s charging wirelessly from the base nearby – and the first product is capable of 5W charging. Not that fast, then, but expect this to change in future versions as the technology develops.
Cast your mind back to when you needed to plug your laptop into a router to connect to the internet. Remember the jolt of freedom that came with losing that cable and connecting through wi-fi? Or cutting the wire on your headphones, for instance.
You can see more about it in the video below.
The charge can travel through objects, though there’s no mention of whether you’ll get a headache if you are the object between the base and phone. My guess is that this millimeter wave will be so gentle that there’s no danger – millimeter wave on an industrial scale is not harmful unless you’re standing within a few feet of a mast, for instance – but we’ll need to hear more about that down the line.
In the meantime, Xiaomi has created a real-world version of something that has previously seemed like pure sci-fi.
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