The Truth about Xiaomi "Air Charging"

so xiaomi have just announced what kind of seems like the biggest leap in smartphones for the last decade i'm not even exaggerating they built a wireless power station which can charge your phone over the air such that you'd never need to plug it into anything again it basically figures out where your phone is within a room and then it fires a narrow beam towards it which can be converted by the phone into charge well that's amazing also bonus points to whoever made this poster for xiaomi nice but see if you go into the actual official tweet where they made this announcement it is filled with comments like i can't believe this is real no way and tell me the price so that i can start planning which organs to sell but this isn't actually new i've already made two full videos on this channel in the past talking about other companies that have tried this and failed we had the motherbox this alien capsule looking device that could broadcast up to 10 watts of power in all directions that was 2017. we've had y charge which called itself the future of power not to mention energis whose concept was almost identical to the one xiaomi's just released none of them have worked why well because air charging is hard like even with this new xiaomi one the power limit per device is kept at five watts five watts is the amount of power that the original iphone from 2007 charged with and in a market where phones with a cable are hitting 120 watts funnily enough actually a lot of them are xiaomi's own phones this is going to feel slow it's the smartphone equivalent of trying to fill up a bottle while the lid's still on but that's only the start of it you see for this to actually work you need not just the base station but also you need a phone that has a beacon antenna that is active all the time to constantly communicate with the base station to make sure it knows where to fire the beam of charge but also 14 other antennae just to be able to convert that air charge into actual battery juice so straight away just the very method by which this works it completely wipes away the possibility of a this working with your existing phone but probably also b any phone that's not a xiaomi phone plus just having all of these antennae active all the time raises another concern see the biggest existing problem with the current standard of wireless charging is the fact that it's super inefficient like compared to a cable which is directly connecting the power source via a highly conductive metal every time you try and charge through one of these pads that energy has to pass through not just the metal but almost always a sheet of plastic from the charger and the sheet of glass on the back of your phone and these are not highly conductive materials and so as a result much less of the energy you put in actually ends up as charge on your phone and much more of it ends up as heat which is not just a complete waste of resources but is also actively bad for your battery's health well air charging is even more wasteful because as well as all of the inefficiencies of normal wireless charging we've now got to use even more energy to not just locate and keep track of where the phone is but also potentially to fire this beam across five meters worth of air and all of this is not even factoring in that the charging station is the size of a fridge the fact that it probably costs as much as your phone itself to buy potential health concerns and the simple fact that this was not a product announcement this was not xiaomi saying hey here's the thing you can pre-order it at this state all this was was xiaomi saying we're working on it the exact same way we saw their mix alpha which never came out the same way we saw their triple folding phone wherever that is the same way as apple's air power which was shown off proudly to the world only then for them to realize yeah this is actually really tricky never mind when i'm gonna do this so what i'm really trying to say in this video is two things number one that i highly doubt this particular product you're seeing in this commercial is anything you're going to be able to buy globally but also number two that i'm really glad xiaomi announced this and if you are enjoying this video by the way then a sub to the channel would be legendary so i realized that i've basically spent the last four minutes just dropping a deuce on the entire idea but even though we've seen this before and even though it hasn't been successful the simple fact that it's xiaomi who's announced that they're working on it instead of some small kickstarter firm is in itself big news because xiaomi is one of the few companies around the world who actually has the scale and the money to do it properly and if you wanted any indication that this could be about to become a huge trend literally hours after xiaomi announced that they were working on this motorola just came out of nowhere and said hey we're working on it too and i could bet my bottom dollar that they are not the only ones but also xiaomi's taken it further than anyone else see their charging station can actually charge multiple devices at once cool but not just that even more significantly they're saying it doesn't matter if other objects come in the way now this is kind of confusing because this whole air charging thing is based on the same millimeter waves the 5g is and 5g is definitely affected with interfering objects so if xiaomi have actually figured a way to get around this then fair play to them and this whole big problem of the charging power being capped at 5 watts the more i think about it the more i realize it might not be a problem remember because you're not actively having to plug your phone into a wall or put it onto a pad where it might restrict how you can use it you can effectively carry on using it like normal while the battery slowly trickles up and so it almost doesn't matter if it's slow because you don't have to do anything now i can already hear it there is a group of you watching this video thinking that is great but why wouldn't all of this r d have been better spent figuring out a way to recycle batteries better is the entire purpose of all of this faff just to literally save me the five seconds it takes me to plug my phone in i'd rather not get blasted with yet more radiation thank you very much i will stick to my cables and you would have a point i mean to be clear the radiation that is being given off here is non-ionizing meaning that it's very unlikely that it's going to start destroying cells in your body like sitting next to an x-ray machine might but to some extent this is untested territory like i said this is using the same millimeter wave technology as a 5g base station and so whilst it's not of course at nearly the same scale i can understand the concern especially if you're going to be sitting right next to it for 10 hours a day so let's wait and see what kind of safety features are announced but i just want to leave you with one thought one thing that i think is the most interesting aspect of this that when air charging gets better and now that a company like xiaomi is investing heavily in it i've got no doubt that it will get better we're not gonna need batteries anymore it'll start with low power devices that you only keep in your home like tv remotes like smart speakers but soon enough i've got no doubt that smart bands and even smartphones will start either massively shrinking the amount of battery they come with and just keeping it as like a backup reserve or just getting rid of the battery entirely maybe that's longer term and this is better news than it sounds batteries are not just one extra component that we end up having to pay for on a phone but they're also the main contributor towards both thickness and weight and batteries are the primary reason that we have to keep swapping our phones every couple of years they're the fastest degrading component so there you have it air charging very possibly the future but the real turning point will come when a big company announces that they've got a retail ready version of this thank you so much for watching my name is aaron this is mr who's the boss and i'll catch you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Mrwhosetheboss

Views: 2,976,641

Rating: 4.9339652 out of 5

Keywords: xiaomi, wireless charging, air charge, air charging, air charging explained, review, true wireless charging, wireless, charge, android, iphone, samsung, motorola, mi air charge technology, mi air charger

Id: PvWMeo1tcgQ

Length: 7min 46sec (466 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/RealGTalkin]

He clearly doesnt understand how electromagnetic induction works

[u/Ryuuie]

If he's incorrect, then someone here should explain what is correct with reputable sources.

There's been nothing but misinformation all over the internet (Reddit itself is worse than YouTube with it) about batteries and heat and charging them and the comments here do nothing but "lol He's a YouTuber" instead of doing the right scientific thing and explaining why he's wrong and backing up your words with real facts.

So, who's going to do that?

[u/bobekyrant]

It feels like he just heard that wireless charging is less efficient and just kind of winged the why and the how.

[u/harsha380]

104k likes 1.4 million views

Misinformation can spread like wildfire can't it?

[u/SnapshillBot]

Snapshots:

1. Mrwhostheboss badly explains wirele... - archive.org, archive.today*

I am just a simple bot, *not** a moderator of this subreddit* | bot subreddit | contact the maintainers

[u/oobctt]

Does he even try to explain it? All I'm seeing is him explaining why its wasteful, I feel like this isn't the right place to post this

[u/Shalmanese]

"Inneficcient"

[u/Blarnix]

He’s right at the part where it’s super inefficient and the way Huawei is doing it will take a lot of development, sure, but he doesn’t fully understand the topic.