Wireless phone charger review

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When will Choice be conducting Wireless Phone Charger review.

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A good idea but different brands have different wireless charging standards, different voltage profiles, etc. I am not certain, but I think that the chargers will therefore be optimised for certain brands.

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It is a standard and there would not be so many aftermarket brands that say they charge any of the wireless rechargeable mobiles if it wasnā€™t a Standard . The level of capacity and the charging rate is determined at the device/battery not the wireless charger. The Standard is called the Qi wireless charging standard and was developed by the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC) for inductive charging over distances of up to 40mm.

The lowest level of charging is at or below 5W but can be much higher, currently up to 65W. Each manufacturer decides how fast their devices will be charged at. 65W is part of the medium power specification.

There are other specifications such as Extended Power Profile (EPP) which supplies charging up to 15W but in the end a mat will only charge to what the receiving device requests. Manufacturers can also go to higher charging levels and this is supported in the Proprietary Power Delivery Extension (PPDE) specification. Samsung and Apple among others use this specification to build their phones to use the higher than 15W charging rate but if a mat is made to only support EPP then the max charge rate of that mat regardless of the receiving deviceā€™s ability, will only be 15W.

The future Ki Standard will supply up to 1kW for charging things like lawn mowers, kitchen devices, electric bikes and so on.

https://www.wirelesspowerconsortium.com/qi/

https://www.wirelesspowerconsortium.com/medium-power/

About Ki:

https://www.wirelesspowerconsortium.com/kitchen/

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Thank you for the correction and clarification.

So works like the USB standards, that if a device or connection is a slower version of USB, a higher speed device will still connect and transfer data, but at a lower speed?

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Yes that is correct, the charge pad rate of charge is determined by the requests from the receiving device. They have altered specifications in the Standard (ie the EPP & PPDE) to take into account that those who produce wireless chargeable devices may wish to take advantage of higher charging rates that are possible can do so.

Qi Standard supports a possible rate of up to 200W but I donā€™t know of anyone yet reaching that level in their productsā€¦ These devices to benefit from those higher rates must be paired with a pad that supports that device but they must all support low power (less than or equal to 5W) so any device can be charged on another deviceā€™s mat, and as EPP (15W) has also been globally adopted all newer devices that meet Qi standards are able to use any pad to obtain that 15W charge rate. To date Samsung I believe have been the only one to show their testing to prove they meet the Qi Standard on their charging pads.

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