Intel is working with a wireless charging company to develop a solution that will let you charge phones and other mobile device simply by placing them near your laptop.
You won’t have to plug in a USB cable, or place the phone on a charging mat for inductive charging. It just needs to be near your laptop to siphon off juice from your laptop battery.
On the one hand… cool! On the other hand… that can’t be good for your laptop’s battery life.
At this point, wireless charging tends to be less efficient than transferring power over a cable of some sort — so I suspect it’ll take longer to charge a phone this way, and you’ll basically be wasting some of the power from your laptop battery by shooting it off into the ether.
Still, it’ll probably be a while before we see this technology in the wild, so there’s still some time to work out the kinks.
Intel is working with IDT (Integrated Device Technology) on the wireless charging system, and a reference design in early 2013.
The technology also isn’t just designed for laptops. IDT says it’s developing a solution for ultrabooks, all-in-one PCs, smartphones, and standalone chargers.
And you’ll also run out your laptop’s battery in two hours…
If we could get electricity stored in a more efficient manner, and give that to laptop makers, this could actually be a really awesome.