The future of wireless charging won’t involve charging pads, and there’s a race between hardware vendors to be the first to make it happen. Various companies have promised to deliver no-contact wireless charging for years now, with some even demonstrating prototypes at tech shows like CES. Today, Xiaomi showed off a tech demo of its “Mi Air Charge” over-the-air charging tech, but Motorola also debuted its own work on no-contact charging today.
A Motorola executive took to Weibo today to share a video showing off a prototype remote charging station with the branding “Motorola One Hyper”, not to be confused with the smartphone by the same name. In the video, which we’ve embedded below, he shows two smartphones charging over distances of 80cm and 100cm. These smartphones look like the Motorola Edge, but it’s unclear what — if any — modifications have been made to them.
The video continues with a demonstration of how charging halts when a person’s hand is placed in front of the charging station. This shows that Motorola designed the system to halt charging when it detects a person move in front of the station, likely for health reasons.
Unlike Xiaomi, Motorola has not appeared to share additional details on how its no-contact wireless charging technology operates. While the company is teasing users on Weibo by asking them if they’d like to see the technology in a future Edge series device, they haven’t confirmed if they are ready to bring this to a commercial product. The implementational and structural problems that need to be overcome are well-understood, so we’re definitely interested in learning how Motorola is approaching this problem.
