Mi Air Charge: The New Way to Charge your phone

We all have been aware of wireless charging taking over the wired charging for some time now. But, let’s be honest, are those wireless charging actually wireless, I mean there is an actual wire connected to an AC plug, and then you place the phone over the charging pad which is connected and not wireless. So, the only difference has been that you are not plugging a wire into your phone, but plugging a charging pad and placing your phone over it. Now just think about it, if, we get to use the phone absolutely normally and the phone charges truly wirelessly i.e., while using it in your hand on the go, wouldn’t that be crazy? Well, there’s one company who is trying and creating all the crazy stuff, we are talking about Xiaomi here.

Xiaomi has introduced an out-of-the-box wireless charging technology as their exclusive technology, and they have decided to call it the “Mi Air Charge”. As the name indicates, Mi Air Charge is developed to provide the users with the capability to remotely charge their smartphones without the need for any of the cables, charging pads, or even the wireless charging stands. This is totally opposite to the currently available wireless charging technologies such as Qi-standard where the power goes wirelessly into the device to be charged using inductive charging with a distance limit of up to 4 cms. Xiaomi’s Mi Air Charge is affirmative that the tech they have created here can charge multiple devices “within a radius of several meters” — including the physical objects being obstacles. But obviously, even after the announcement, this amazing technology won’t be available to the public as it is shown as a concept product.

To develop this Mi Air Charge wireless charging technology, the Chinese giant has developed a self-designed in-house isolated charging pile with a phase control array that consists of 144, antennas (yeah, that’s massive) which transmits millimetre-wide waves. These waves travel directly to the smartphone that needs to be charged via beamforming. To locate the smartphone in the environment nearby, the product has five phase interference antennas.

This being a proprietary technology infrastructure, the smartphones which will work with Mi Air Charge surely require an antenna array with a built-in beacon antenna and receiving antenna array.

“Beacon antenna broadcasts position information with low power consumption. The receiving antenna array composed of 14 antennas converts the millimetre wave signal emitted by the charging pile into electric energy through the rectifier circuit, to turn the sci-fi charging experience into reality,” the company said in a blog post.

The model here can deliver 5W remote charging to a single device in few meters range, but the company has also said that multiple devices can be can be charged at once with 5W being delivered to each of them, though the exact number of devices which can be used at once is not known as of now. With this technology, the company aims at charging almost all the wearable devices with this in near future.

“Soon our living room devices, including speakers, desk lamps and other small smart home products, will all be built upon a wireless power supply design, completely free of wires, making our living rooms truly wireless,” the company said.

Other than Xiaomi, companies like Motorola and Oppo are also trying to develop such a truly wireless charging experience.