paulplatt

I mentioned earlier the issue with battery technology and my dream of the phone as the primary computer. One solution is to make chairs with built in chargers. Imagine sitting at your desk and having you phone automatically charged. Your mouse, keyboard and display are linked wirelessly. You get up and go into a meeting room. When you sit down, wireless charging circuitry in the chair keeps your phone from running down. A wireless link causes the screen built into the table to go active and the keyboard and mouse in front of you go active – all linked to your phone. Effective wireless charging technology would mean that today’s battery technology would be adequate. The problem is with the charging technology. It doesn’t really exist. There are inductive chargers but to be efficient they require that both ends, the phone and the charger, be in close physical proximity with separations on the order of centimeters. For what I want, charging needs to ideally be effective over distances of a meter but at least a third of that. A new approach is being developed by uBeam. This is a very small company. Actually the company is just two college students. That said, they are trying a novel approach using beamed ultrasonic waves. If it works as advertised then another part of the puzzle needed for true convergence just might be falling into place. I am trying to find out more about this to see if it is something to get excited about. Stay tuned.