Running out of juice in an electric car tends to be more of a headache, assuming you're stuck on the side of the road out of extension cable reach from an outlet, but Blink thinks it has the answer. The Blink mobile EV charger is designed for an emergency top-up to get your electric vehicle back on the road, though it doesn't take eagle-eyes to see exactly where that backup power is coming from.
It's not uncommon for companies to boast about technologies they're working on, especially if they stand a chance of beating everyone else to the finish line. It also isn't uncommon for some companies to oversell such future technologies, leaving their own fans hanging and disappointed. Xiaomi may be finding itself in that exact position now that its own vice-president has admitted that the scary-fast 100W charging technology it showed off still has a few major hurdles to overcome before it is ready to be safely used in smartphones.
The European Union has voted to approve a common charger standard, despite Apple's protestations that it could hamper innovation, and now aims to fast-track the rule in the name of cutting down on e-waste. The new regulation comes after years of the EU hoping that manufacturers would voluntarily adopt charger standards, only to find those hopes frustrated.
There was a time in the past when owning a phone from a Chinese phone meant holding an iPhone clone. These days, you'd be hard-pressed to find such a phone from a reputable brand as these companies started branching out with their own identities and, more importantly, their own innovations. In fact, many of the trends in the mobile market today don't come from Samsung or Apple but from the likes of Xiaomi, Vivo, and OPPO. The latter is particularly known for its fast-charging technologies and the latest OPPO Reno Ace brings all of the company's best parts in one accessible package.
Almost all smartphones these days now have some form of fast charging tech or another but despite the amazing advances in that area, the painful truth is that batteries themselves have remained the same for the past years. Fast charging technologies may only take minutes to fully charge to full but usually at the expense of battery health. That's why OnePlus has developed what is practically the reverse of its DASH Charge that slows charging down when you leave the phone plugged in overnight.
It may have just announced its first diversion into a new market with the Soundform Elite Hi-Fi Smart Speaker + Wireless Charger but Belkin hasn't forgotten about its core product line. In fact, it is flooding the CES 2020 showroom floor with chargers and power banks, figuratively, of course. Riding the wave of recent trends, almost all of Belkin's new 2020 chargers are of the wireless variety and the one that doesn't at least sport a USB-C connection to accommodate most of the latest smartphones, tablets, and even laptops.
One of the biggest logistic problems with electric vehicles or EVs is charging locations. Often you have to drive to these stations that are laid out in sprawling areas to accommodate multiple cars at once. Sometimes, however, the best time to charge such a car is when it's parked but parking spaces are cramped and putting a charging station there could cause a line that will block the flow of cars in and out parking. Volkswagen is almost genius in its simplicity and brings the charging station to the car instead, courtesy of a self-driving robot and its "wagon".
Apple has yet to solve the Apple Watch's battery life problem but, in the meantime, accessory makers are seeing an opportunity to capitalize on the need to charge the wearable on the go. Apple's own charging accessories for the Apple Watch can be big or long, depending on which one you go for. Satechi, however, is offering an almost ingenious solution that simply sticks the magnetic charging dock to the side of a MacBook or iPad Pro.
Can you imagine a world where each appliance company used its own proprietary plug? While plugs do differ between countries and regions, they are mostly standardized across all products. Sadly, that's not the case with electric cars which are still in their infancy stage. Fortunately, Google Maps continually makes it easier for EV owners to find charging stations, particular the ones that have sockets compatible with their brand.
It may be talking a lot about its vision to expand to new frontiers like networking, AR, and IoT but it's hard to deny that, at least for now, OPPO's main breadwinner is its smartphone business. 5G may be at the center of the company's plans but, until it becomes truly ubiquitous, consumers will experience the next-gen network standard primarily through smartphones. That's why at its inaugural INNO DAY 2019 event, OPPO not only reminded media about the things it has already done for the mobile industry, it also showed off the innovations that will be coming to its smartphones starting as early as this month.
Apple may not have been able to figure out AirPower, but that isn't stopping Nomad from making a wireless charging pad that promises to top up your phone regardless of where you set it down. The Nomad Base Station Pro debuts Aira's FreePower technology, which removes the need to precisely set down a Qi-compatible gadget on a charging pad.
This week a variety of new rules were revealed for Google Certified Android smartphones of the future. The document in which these rules were revealed is the Google Mobile Services (GMS) Compatibility Definition Document (CDD) for Android 10. Devices launching in the year 2019 and forward hoping to get Google's certification for Android will need to be compliant with certain open fast-charging standards for USB-C.*