Wireless charging is the epitome of the kind of innovation that is a solution in need a problem.
It’s slower to charge, finicky to position your phone correctly (and if you fail you wake up to a dead phone), and you can’t use it while it’s charging.
Unclear what the benefit is. Interoperability? USB-C gives us that. Saving time? But it takes longer to position your phone over the charger.
What am I missing? 🤔
@leaverou I was originally skeptical, but I really prefer wireless charging now, for the following reasons:
- It’s very easy to just have a pad at my desk(s) and on my nightstand and when I take my phone out of my pocket, I put it on there instead of on the table. The tiny decrease in friction makes it way more likely that I’m going to charge as I go.
- I like being able to pick up the phone without any tether and put it right back.
- I’ve had a few phones start to have problems with the USB port. Wireless charging avoids that problem and also reduces strain on the USB port throughout the life of the device.
I haven’t noticed my phone charging particularly slower when charging wirelessly when compared to being plugged in, but even if that were the case I don’t think it would matter much. The low-friction nature of the charging makes it so that my phone doesn’t ever get terribly low in the first place, but even on days when I don’t charge during the day, I always get a full charge overnight anyway (and even a dramatic difference like 2 hours vs 1 hours wouldn’t matter in that case).
@leaverou That said, I have heard that with the current generation of batteries, it’s better to run them lower before charging them rather than having them hover around 100% all the time.
That said, battery life in a phone has almost never gotten so bad that I was bothered by it before something else dramatic happened to make me get a new phone, and the few times I’ve had to replace a battery it was pretty simple and/or cheap to do — even in the modern era where no phones have user-replaceable batteries (😭).
As an aside — up until around 4-5 years ago, I always had replaceable batteries, so I also often didn’t use the USB port, I would charge the batteries by themselves and then swap them out when the one in the phone got too low.