The positives and negatives of wirelessly charging your phone

By Warren Miller, contributing writer

Have you ever wondered how the battery in your electric toothbrush recharges without having to plug it in? Why can’t your cellphone do the same thing? Will there ever come a day when you won’t have to worry about forgetting your phone charger in your hotel room? Maybe, but probably not in the way that you’d expect. 

Wireless charging has been around for years, incorporated into things like cordless telephones, MP3 players, and power tools. But the word “wireless” is a little misleading, because there are wires conducting electricity. They’re just attached to the docking station that you plug your electric device into instead of the device itself. Cellphone manufacturers are starting to incorporate the same kind of technology into phone chargers. But how does it work?

Wireless charging needs to be more convenient than wired. Image source: Pixabay.

Simply put, the secret is electromagnetism. Both the device you’re charging and its docking station have small coils that, when placed in close enough proximity to one another, create a magnetic field. That magnetic field produces energy, and that energy can be converted into electricity by a process called electromagnetic induction. The coils are made of electrically conducive materials, and when the magnetic field they create causes them to vibrate, the electrons they’re made up of at the atomic level begin to move, creating electricity. This electricity is then transferred to the charging circuit in your phone (or other wireless device) and begins to charge the battery.

The emergence of wireless charging standards is helping to accelerate the use of wireless charging. The Apple iPhone and Samsung Galaxy phone use the Qi wireless charging standards, so other manufacturers are likely to move in that direction, too. If we can get to the point where a wireless charging standard really takes off, we might find inexpensive charging stands in hotels, in restaurants, and in coffee shops, for example.

Wireless charging needs to be more convenient than wired, because wireless does have a few drawbacks. For one thing, wireless charging is much slower and less efficient than plugging your phone into a wall outlet. The process itself can also generate a lot of heat, which can be harmful to personal electronic devices. And if that weren’t enough, wireless charging is currently less cost-effective than the old-fashioned way, both at the manufacturing level and for the consumer.

Let’s hope that an inexpensive wireless charging standard emerges quickly and becomes widely available. A little less efficiency and larger charging times won’t matter too much if most of the places you visit have convenient charging stations. However, you may want to invest in a personalized cellphone case because some charging stations might be used for multiple phones at once to reduce cost. You probably don’t want to accidentally grab the wrong phone off the communal charging mat on your way out of the coffee shop.