When it comes time to charge your phone, you typically have a couple of options to choose from. You can plug it in and have to fiddle with a cable, making sure that you’re plugging it in the right direction, or you can use wireless charging and just plop your phone onto a charging pad. But while wireless charging is more convenient than traditional charging, it typically charges a phone much slower than using a cable. Thanks to a new Qi spec, that will soon change.
The Wireless Power Consortium has announced a new Qi specification that will let a charger deliver 15 watts of power to a wireless charging-compatible phone. This will decrease the time required to charge up a device wirelessly. The new Qi spec is also backward compatible with older versions of the Qi standard.
While wireless charging is super convenient, sometimes you want to just plug your phone in for 15 minutes to juice it back up before heading back into the world, and that’s a task that the current version of wireless charging is ill-suited for. This new Qi specification sounds like it should change that, which is exciting news for anyone that loves to just drop their phone onto a table and not have to futz with a cable.
We’ll have to wait and see exactly how much wireless charging will improve with this new Qi spec, but if you’ve previously passed on Qi because you thought it charged slowly, it may soon be worth another look.