Wireless charging has long been a wet dream for many in the industry, but it wasn’t until 2008 when over 60 companies got together and formed the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC) with the express goal of creating a standard that would work across various devices and across different vendors that people actually started believing that one day the need for wires would disappear. In July 2010 the WPC gave birth to the Qi standard, and since then we’ve seen only a handful of products hit the market that are Qi enabled. The two problems holding back mass adoption: size and cost. Texas Instruments, looking to break into the market while it’s still early days, has just announced the bq51013, which tackles the two previously mentioned problems. The bq51013 measures just 1.9 mm x 3 mm, making it over 80% smaller than the previous generation solution, and it can be had for $3.50 if you order 1,000 units, which still makes it a bit cost prohibitive compared to something like say near field communications or GPS. We’ve yet to see an analyst firm make predictions about Qi adoption over the next 3 to 5 years, but if we had to guess we’d say Qi is going to stay niche for at least another 2 years.
It’s not like we don’t like the technology, but the reality of today’s mobile industry is hardware vendors are facing ever decreasing margins thanks to the commoditization brought about by Google’s Android operating system. Adding such an expensive chip to your bill of materials, instead of opting to invest those dollars and cents into something like better housing materials or a slightly faster processor, doesn’t really make much sense. There’s no doubt in our minds that at some point in the future everything will be Qi enabled, but in the short term it’s nothing more than a bullet point on a spec sheet that many will ignore. The industry only now started standardizing on microUSB, so think how long it’ll take to move to this.