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Comment by joenathanone | Hacker News Reader

Can't tell does this have wireless charging and NFC? Those would be the only show stoppers for me, otherwise this looks like my next phone.

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It has NFC but it doesn't seem to have wireless charging (Qi/PMA).

https://www.asus.com/Mobile/Phones/ZenFone/Zenfone-9/techspe...

What's stopping everyone from adding wireless charging? Google and Moto had it and dropped it. Apple added it recently. Etc?

This is really bothering me too, as there's been a couple phones released lately that are as close to perfect for me as I'll get, but no wireless charging is basically a deal breaker for me.

I think maybe it's the resurgence of metal frames on lower priced phones, which maybe doesn't work as well as glass or plastic.

Which is also annoying because I despise glass as a back surface for phones. Makes them slide off every surface.

Qi adds weight for coil and shield, and limits what material can be used for back surface that's also tend to add weight. For example, iPhone 8 added Qi and switched back surface material from aluminum to glass. 7 Plus is 188g then 8 Plus is 202g. It's not easy decision to have Qi for lightweight oriented device.

> iPhone 8 added Qi

Are you sure? My wife has an iPhone 8 and it doesn't charge in our car which has wireless charging in the phone tray.

Yeah, perhaps your case don't support Qi, phone coil isn't placed on your Qi tray coil, other metals is on Qi tray so it's stopped for safety, or something goes wrong...

I'm curious what your use case for NFC is.

Tap to pay is a big one.

That's very fair. Thanks! I keep a credit card in my phone case for tap so am old school I guess and haven't set this up.

Many, many people in UK use GOOG pay (wallet now) to pay for goods and services. A few contort their wrists to show off their Apple watch, but phones are more than commonplace.

That makes sense and I didn't appreciate it was NFC based. Canada was pretty quick to bring in tap credit cards so I've just done this and not set it up.

WebAuthn security keys.

Overly specific use case: I used to have to reach under my desk to find the power switch of the power strip that my monitor and speakers are connected too. I got a Zigbee-enabled power plug, but I thought needing to open the app everytime is also annoying. So I got 2 NFC cards (transport tickets that usually get swallowed by the machine after use, but if you don't use them then, hey, cheap NFC tags!), and programmed Tasker to talk to a HTTP server on my NAS when my phone notices these NFC tags. The backend talks to the Philips Hue hub to switch on/off the power plug and then sends a Wake-on-LAN to turn on my desktop PC.

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