Wireless power transmission is a holy grail that's always hovering, mirage-like, on the gadget world's horizons. The last one to make a splash was the WildCharger, a conductive, contact-required system; now entering that space is eCoupled, created by Michigan-based Fulton Innovation, itself anointed a "Cool Vendor" by the prognosticators at Gartner.
Like WildCharger and others, it presented itself at CES 2007 and went away very happy. The system is inductive, not conductive, which means that it can slurp power from anywere within the induction field. This is, in prinicple, more convenient.
The downside to all these systems is that some part of it must be present in the device for it to work: batteries don't just magically absorb juice. The challenge is to convince the likes of Sony, Canon, HP, Dell, and so on to integrate it.
The alternative is an unwelcome external dongle or adapter. And, indeed, here we see a docking system before us: a big, ugly one, too. "You can wirelessly recharge your gadgets, so long as you plug them into our adapter dock," doesn't quite have the futuristic* je ne sais quoi* we're looking for.
Amusing coda: eCoupled's website features an arty swirl of fractal cigarette smoke. Probably not the right image to project when folks are raving about how electromagnetic fields cause cancer.
Home Page [eCoupled]
Video [eCoupled]
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