UBeam wireless charging demonstration

usatoday.com

13 points·paladin314159··8 comments

I'm still extremely skeptical about this. The inverse square law is a huge hurdle, power delivery rate has got to be minuscule.

This isn't making a better charger, it's making better physics.

> power delivery rate has got to be minuscule

Amazing that during the whole presentation the word "watt" was never mentioned to describe the power delivered and at what range.

Could it be used to power wireless mice, keyboards, etc? Things that are generally low power but still require batteries every N months?

http://liesandstartuppr.blogspot.com/2017/06/what-does-it-ta...

No idea about speed of charge. That's what the game is right now. I used to have a phone with wireless charging but it was way slower than using the wired smart charger (the one with the tech from Qualcomm)

But if this was present in your office/classroom/car it wouldn't matter if it was slow, as long as it was fast enough to provide more power than you were using at a given time. I.e. It doesn't matter if it takes 5 hours to charge if you're around a source 8 or 9 hours a day.

Exactly. I have 2 wireless (Qi) chargers at home (1 at my desk, and one near my bed) and 1 at my workplace. Sure, the speed is quite a bit slower than wired chargers (charges from 0-100 in a couple of hours when idle, instead of < 1 hour when using a quick charge wired charger), but it's completely effortless to keep my phone on a charger almost constantly, so it's always near 100% when I need to leave with it. And I still have the option to use the wired charger for when I really need that quick boost, but I personally haven't touched mine in years.

On one hand, it's crazy that they pulled this off, of the other hand, I'm not sure if I see the practical applications of near-range wireless line-of-sight charging

Reply on news.ycombinator.com