IKEA has announced that it will stock desks, tables, and lamps capable of wirelessly charging your phone, laptop, and other devices in Europe and North America as early as April.
While elsewhere, we'll have to wait indefinitely for their 'global roll-out' to reach us, this is still the most promising prospect of wireless charging that we've seen. Earlier this year, a router that can wirelessly charge up to 12 devices from almost 5 metres away was introduced at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which the developers say will be available from December this year, and in 2014, scientists at MIT announced they'd invented a new device that can sense where your phone is and fire a magnetic field in its direction to keep it charged up. So wireless charging is definitely the future, but IKEA might be the first to put the technology in our homes.
"Through research and home visits, we know that people hate cable mess. They worry about not finding the charger and running out of power," Ikea's business area manager of lighting and wireless charging, Jeanette Skjelmose, said in a statement.
The new furniture uses Qi wireless technology, developed by a group of technology manufacturers called the Wireless Power Consortium. Late last year, they announced that they were including a technology called 'resonance charging' that means the device no longer has to make contact with the charger for it to work. Brad Molen explains at Engadget:
"This makes it so the receiver (the device that needs to be charged) and the transmitter (the charging pad or surface that's pushing the power to the device) won't need to physically touch each other anymore;" and can be up to 45mm (1.77 inches) apart. The new standard is backwards-compatible, so if you already have a smartphone or tablet with Qi built-in, you'll be able to charge them up from as much as 35mm away. The standard also allows multiple devices to charge up at the same time, provided they're both within range, and it will be capable of pushing as much as 2,000 watts to larger products like kitchen appliances."
The question is whether IKEA have figured out how to get that 3 to 4 centimetre tether extended, but even if they don't, those few centimetres are enough for us to do away with that mass of cords under our beds and desks we hate so much.
"This is (a) very early time in the furniture business to blend wireless technology," Jeff Kagan, a technology industry analyst, told AFP. "I expect every other furniture maker to jump on this same bandwagon."
WE HOPE SO.