Wireless Charging – Usual muddle

From a muddle of three standards one should emerge.

• Wireless charging is a great accessory to have but high cost and standard fragmentation are so far preventing it from really establishing itself.
• There are three competing standard bodies; the Power Mat Alliance (PWA), the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC) that promotes the Qi standard and the Alliance for Wireless Power (AW4P).
• These are three competing standards that are not interoperable and it is clear that the consumer and the industry will be best served by the adoption of a single standard.
• Qualcomm has become an important force in wireless charging due to its size and market share in mobile chipsets but also because it is now a member of all three alliances.
• AW4P uses a Qualcomm based technology (acquired) that has certain advantages over both WPC and Powermat.
• These are:
  • Multiple devices can be charged upon one mat.
  • The device can be positioned anywhere on the mat.
  • Devices can be charged at a small distance from the mat
  • Different types of devices can simultaneously be charged.
• However, almost all of the implementations of wireless charging in the mobile phone and tablet markets use WPC or Qi.
• This gives Qi a huge advantage as it appears to be the preferred choice of all the hardware makers at present.
• I suspect that Qualcomm’s presence within all of these alliances is aimed at converging these standards into one.
• If the final standard ends up using some of Qualcomm’s technology then all the better but given history (see below) I do not think that Qualcomm will push for the adoption of AW4P at the expense of the other two.
• (Qualcomm had its own version of the LTE standard but when it was clear that no one wanted it, Qualcomm pragmatically abandoned it and focused on LTE).
• Hence I suspect that the end result will be that future iterations of Qi adopt aspects of AW4P that confer the above advantages.
• Powermat, which has neither the adoption of Qi nor the technical advantages of AW4P looks very unlikely to make it in the mobile phone or tablet markets.
• Hence, I am pretty hopeful that a single and much improved wireless charging standard will emerge from the WPC but expect that it will take some time to hit the market in volumes.
• As a user of wireless charging, it makes my life easier and is a convenience that I would be willing to pay a small premium for.
• Hence, if it is priced right, I can see it winning high penetration in the mobile phone market.