so imagine this you got a hot date who's hanging onto your every word and she's
asking you what's next on the docket for the evening you bust out your phone to
get directions to an incredibly romantic used video game shop and suddenly you
notice it's deader than your last relationship you start to panic but
suddenly your date pulls out her phone holds it against yours and what you
initially think is some kind of weird courtship ritual but then you see that
your phone is working again thanks to wireless power sharing so you
immediately have two thoughts one she's a keeper and two
how in the heck does wireless power sharing work well we explained the basic principle
behind wireless charging in general in our previous video on distance charging
which you can check out up here but the idea is that when you run a current
through a coil of wire and bring it close to another coil of wire a physical
phenomenon called electromagnetic induction induces a current in the
second coil this is how regular wireless chargers work including the relatively
common qi chargers and even electric toothbrushes but what makes wireless
power sharing different so the biggest difference is that your phone ends up
charging another device directly from its main battery up until now
traditional wireless charging has used a base station that's plugged into a wall
outlet or it's taken the form of a wireless battery bank the advantage to
wireless power sharing is that you don't need any extra equipment like an
external charger or a power bank and the phone itself doesn't even have to be any
larger it simply uses a small induction coil built into the phone's body
currently the most well-known phone that features this technology is the samsung
galaxy s10 which can not only power up the company's galaxy watch and galaxy
buds but also any other phone that supports qi charging now reportedly the
recently launched iphone 11 lineup also contains the hardware to support
wireless power sharing but apple has disabled the feature for now for reasons
that aren't totally clear perhaps the performance wasn't up to scratch
indeed wireless power sharing does come at a rather steep energy cost in a best
case scenario current technology will provide around 500 milliamps of current
which isn't all that much so if you're trying to charge a smartphone with a 3
500 milliamp hour battery that means it would take roughly three and a half
hours just to get the charge up to 50
however the galaxy s10 reportedly loses around one quarter of its battery life
for every hour that it has wireless power sharing enabled so you shouldn't
expect to get anywhere even close to fully charging another phone anyway
wireless power sharing is pretty inefficient in that less than half of
the power used up by one battery will wind up in the other battery so right
now the technology is best suited for quick top-ups when you need a second
phone to just work for a short period of time or if you're charging up less
power-hungry devices like smart watches however as phone battery technology
progresses we may end up seeing more robust wireless power sharing solutions
for now it's a good way to keep you going in a pinch so you can think of it
as like an energy drink for your phone that hopefully won't give it the jitters
half an hour later speaking of half an hour later don't
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