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Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

I can slap my phone down on the charger next to my bed in the dark. I can grab my phone off the charger on my desk at work with one hand. Before wireless charging, it wasn't much hassle, and I only rarely had trouble with my phone battery dying. Now it's almost no hassle, and I never have trouble with my battery dying. It's just a nice quality-of-life boost.

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This made a lot (more) sense when even corded charging was kind of slow and meant that the use time to charge time was pretty bad; ~2 hours to charge: ~12 hours to use gives an optimistic 6 use/charge time ratio, but now that fast charging and USB-C power deliver devices can charge in ~30 minutes and last ~20 hours that gives a use/charge ratio of 40. Given that if I have to leave my phone on a wireless charger for much longer; I greatly increase the risk that I'm picking up an undercharged phone.

But like in your use case, it's a nice to have thing that provides standby charging and can prevent your phone from at least loosing power over the day. Honestly, I think the best solution would be a USB-C dock so that you would have the convienience of wireless with the fast speed (and PC connection potentionally) of a wired connection.

I have done some testing with the 3rd party iPhone chargers recently. I have a device that measures the number of watts the charger is generating for the phone. The limit on wireless charging is 7.5 watts and many of them don’t quite get there. Most are between 5 and 6 watts. Now this is about the same as the stock Apple charger that comes with your iPhone. I ended up buying a 3rd party charger that supports up to 20 watts for the fast charging compatible iPhones such as 8, X and Xs. You also need the $20 Apple usb-c to lightning cable, but the result is a truly fast charge. Of course my 2015 Samsung Galaxy s6 came with a fast charger in the box, but I am glad that with pricy accessories we can have the same with the iPhone

I have to agree. A dock or pad with a cable or two and an inductive charging mat would be ideal. I like my setup, but it'd be much easier to remember to charge my AirPods if I could just place them on a pad, or just casually laying my phone down, and still getting a charge, but having the option of a cable for the fast charge and being able to charge and use simultaneously.

I have a quad lock desk mount with Qi charger attachment I use at my work desk. It's wonderful and fulfils a similar use case that you have specified here. I can quickly attach the phone and it's charging... often charging all day as I work. I also have a Qi Ikea charger next to it that is often used while I am doing other activities away from my desk. The Quad Lock desk mount is great for seeing notifications coming in, and the Ikea charger is handy if I need a quick top-up during the day and I'm in a rush and drop it in place.

Is that not something many people can do one-handed?

The last time I had any trouble doing that one-handed was in the era of proprietary inch-wide charge connectors.

Last I checked, I only had one opposable thumb per hand. I need that to hold my phone, so how would I grab the cable? With my teeth?

As the other commenter said, the more convenient method is to hold the phone upside-down and pull it out.

The less portable method, assuming you have a phone sufficiently smaller than your hand and sufficient pull, is to pull the cord out using some of the non-opposable digits that are located near the phone bottom when it's right-side up.

I usually opt for the former, but the latter is much more feasible than I would have expected (IME USB-C is not that hard to tug out, by mistake or otherwise, though it's still better than microUSB B).

It’s not super convenient, but I do it this way: press the phone to the ball of my palm with the middle, ring and little finger and use the thumb and the index finger to pull the cable out. The trickiest part is the positioning of the phone in the palm, because that pulling motion has a very limited range.

And unless your phone has the charging port at the top, you're now holding it upside down.

That’s nice for you, but some of us suffer from disorders that lead to shaking hands and poor coordination, such that plugging in a device to such a small port is a grueling, sometimes impossible task. What then?

Sure, I wasn't trying to imply anything about people who, for one reason or another, had difficulty with or could not do it, I was just expressing surprise that this might be a much larger subset of people than I had previously thought.

I think it’s something most people _can_ do, but _don’t_ do simply because unplugging the cord from the bottom of your phone with one hand is rather awkward, especially with larger models.

Constantly recharging your phone is suppose to reduce your battery’s max capacity over time I.e your battery lasts less

I don't believe this is true of modern Li-ion batteries.

Constantly charging causes fewer power cycles and extends your battery life.

Who is right here?

First one would be right if cell phones used old style nickel-cad batteries. But, they don't, they're Lithium-ion.

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