Wireless charging to get a boost from Samsung, Qualcomm
At CTIA in New Orleans, Samsung and Qualcomm debut an industry group formed to create and promote a new wireless charging standard. — Follow @KentGerman — Wireless charging isn't new, but the technology soon will get a new push …
Context & Ripple Effects
The announcement lands mid-CTIA news cycle and drew unusually broad pickup — The Register, Engadget, GigaOM, The Verge, PC World, SlashGear, IntoMobile and PC World all ran it on or about May 8, 2012 — a sign that who backs a wireless charging standard matters more than the demo itself. Samsung arrives at the group as the world's largest smartphone maker by volume, while Qualcomm sits on the silicon side, so the pair spans both the handsets and the chipsets any charging scheme would have to reach.
The framing matters: the group is chartered to create *and* promote a standard, not merely publish specs. For Samsung, which some observers already flag as overly dependent on Google's Android, a hardware-level standard it co-authors is one more lever of differentiation at a moment when its patent litigation with Apple remains live even as the two drop specific claims against each other.
First-order effects
- Samsung and Qualcomm convert their respective positions — largest smartphone maker, major mobile chipset supplier — into founding influence over a wireless charging specification, giving OEMs a second institutional home for the technology beyond whatever existed before.
- Device makers and accessory vendors now face a choice of which camp to certify against, because a standard promoted by two companies with Samsung's and Qualcomm's reach cannot be ignored.
Second-order effects
- If Qualcomm folds the emerging spec into its chipset reference designs, wireless charging stops being an aftermarket accessory purchase and becomes a line item in OEM bill-of-materials decisions — pressuring rivals like Nokia and RIM, both already pushing NFC into devices, to answer on the adjacent near-field feature set.
- Apple, still locked in litigation with Samsung over core smartphone features, faces a competitor-defined charging ecosystem taking shape around the Android side of the market.
Third-order effects
- Standards efforts seeded by rival vendor coalitions historically end in either convergence or costly duplication; whether this group consolidates with other charging bodies or fragments the accessory market is the open question its formation sets up.
- If the pattern holds, connectivity and power interfaces become arenas where handset makers and silicon vendors compete through standards bodies rather than through patents alone — a quieter complement to the courtroom fight.
The trend: Smartphone leaders are increasingly using standards bodies as competitive instruments, pairing handset scale with chipset control to shape ecosystems before products ship.