An ambitious plan to make wireless charging as common as wifi

Disclosure: This story resulted from a trip paid for by CES.

Imagine: instead of fishing for your charging cord everytime just to replenish your smartphone battery, you simply chuck your phone into the bedside drawer. Take it out a few hours later and it’s fully charged.

Suppose now that you’re on the road, and you find your smartwatch low on juice. Rather than searching your car for the cable, you drop it into the cup holder. The battery begins refilling.

Now, let’s say you’re an old person with a hearing aid. Instead of struggling to replace its tiny batteries with not-so-nimble hands, you simply place it into a container to charge it.

Humavox is on a mission to make wireless charging as ubiquitious and easy-to-use as wifi. The startup’s trying to integrate its receivers into all electronic devices, and transmitters into as many things as it can find – furniture, cars, cases, houses, bags – you name it.

What’s novel about the Israeli company’s technology is its use of radio waves to fill up batteries. Prevalent wireless chargers based on the Qi standard, meanwhile, use electromagnetic induction – magnets, in other words.

Charge your Google Glass in a drawer.

Qi has a problem: devices need to be placed on a charging mat precisely. If it’s off by just a bit, the charging slows to a crawl. It’s a headache for users, which means as irritating as cords are, they’re still the best solution.

Radio waves could change the game, claims Omri Lachman, founder and CEO of Humavox. His company’s transmitters can create a charging zone anywhere. Which means as long as a device is dropped into a volume of space, it will link up with the transmitter and begin charging. No worrying about exact placement.

“The user doesn’t need to think how it works,” says Omri, further claiming that Humavox’s charging duration will be no different from a cord.

There’s been a lot of fuss about wireless charging, but no one has made a real breakthrough yet. So, what makes Humavox different from other startups like Energous?

Omro says Energous’s technology has many flaws. It stems from one big difference: Energous transfers energy across the room, Humavox works in a confined space.