Washington Post's Rob Pegoraro, IDG's Nancy Gohring are sucked in by cordless power: Pegoraro describes spotting two wireless power firms that he describes as more plugless than wireless. Powercast can "broadcast" power over three feet to circuits that could be integrated into existing electronics. Fulton's eCoupled, by contrast, uses charging surface: an equipped device, when it touches an otherwise safe charging surface, trickles in power.
My good friend Nancy, meanwhile, arrives at the end of 17-hour trip from Ireland to Las Vegas, and finds one missing charging cable and one broken one. She offers more detail about eCoupled. The company expects travelers could bring a small pad with them that plugs into AC power and then place their various devices on top, avoiding the need to bring cables of any kind. Motorola, Visteon, and Herman Miller are all working with eCoupled, though no products are announced.
How is the eCoupled gadget any different than the very same approach used for many years by rechargeable electric toothbrushes?
My SonicCare brush charges itself through a sealed all-plastic contact surface using the age-old principle of collapsing magnetic flux fields from the charger, which induce a small electric current into the brush's pickup windings. It's done without any metal-to-metal contact and the watertight all-plastic case of the toothbrush.
What exactly is novel or exciting about this?
[Editor's note: The amount of voltage and amperage that they've managed to get to pass and the tiny size of the circuit required in the device to enable charging. A toothbrush doesn't require a 75 or 90 or even 120 watt adapter to charge its battery when you're using an AC-to-DC converter!--gf]