Wireless Charging Is a Disaster Waiting to Happen
debugger.medium.com
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I still think wireless charging is a gimmick. I'd rather have a cable and a port that's easier to put in and more resistant to wear/breakage/clogging. Or a desk with a little stand that I can just drop my phone into and it'll make a physical connection and charge more efficiently.
A final advantage to cables: if you want to charge wirelessly, you have to put your phone down! With a nice long cable by your bed, you can lay there and use your phone as long as you want.
For example having it at my desk is great. My phone just sits there for hours at a time and having a slow charge is great. It doesn't matter that I have to put my phone down because I am at the computer, I'm not using my phone anyways (other than maybe to take a quick photo, but a 30s break in charging isn't a problem for me).
> I'd rather have a cable and a port that's easier to put in and more resistant to wear/breakage/clogging.
I don't see how a connector and cable will be more resistant to wear/breakage/clogging than two flat surfaces.
I agree it sounds like your desk has a poor implementation. I definitely wouldn't want it raised. But I don't think that makes the technology bad in general.
At the end of the day I think it comes down to slightly easier to use in tradeoff for a slower charge and maybe easier to accidentally disconnect. However for me that is actually a favourable tradeoff for almost all of my charging.
I retrofitted both. MagSafe means you can hide the phone anywhere convenient - in my case it's on the underside of the center console door.
> In my tests, I found that wireless charging used, on average, around 47% more power than a cable.
Not once does the article cite a single figure on the actual charging efficiency achieved in any of its tests.
Yes, it does say that "47% more power" was used, but this is of course not the efficiency. It allows you to calculate the efficiency, which most people would screw up.
Not great.
"“We worked out that at 100% efficiency from wall socket to battery, it would take about 73 coal power plants running for a day to charge the 3.5 billion smartphone batteries once fully,” iFixit technical writer Arthur Shi told OneZero. But if people place their phones wrong and reduce the efficiency of their charging, the number grows: “If the wireless charging efficiency was only 50%, you would need to double the [73] power plants in order to charge all the batteries.”"
See the problem? Not a single one of their tests with a phone lined up properly on the coils had efficiency this poor. Neither was the average efficiency in their tests ever this poor. MagSafe has already fixed the alignment issue and one can certainly assume the entire Android world will have followed suit before too long.