NFC Forum unveils its Wireless Charging Specification, allowing 1 watt charging for smaller devices
It might soon be much easier to buy a smartphone that can charge small devices like earbuds or smartwatches. The NFC Forum, responsible for near-field communications tech, has unveiled the Wireless Charging Specification (WLC).
Context & Ripple Effects
Wireless charging standards have been consolidating for years — rival groups A4WP and PMA merged back in 2015 — and the NFC Forum is now staking out its own slice of the market. Its Wireless Charging Specification targets just 1 watt, aimed at earbuds and smartwatches rather than phones.
The pitch is that NFC radios are already built into most smartphones, so accessory charging becomes a spec update rather than new hardware. That positions the Forum alongside — and partly against — the Wireless Power Consortium, whose Qi ecosystem dominates phone charging and has since pushed speeds up with Qi2 25W adoption across iPhone and major Android devices.
First-order effects
- Smartphone makers gain a path to reverse-charge earbuds and smartwatches through NFC silicon they already ship, without adding a dedicated charging coil.
- Small-device makers get a second standards track beyond Qi for trickle-charging wearables and hearables.
Second-order effects
- The Wireless Power Consortium's counter-move is already visible in its later Qi2 25W push, effectively partitioning the market: Qi keeps the high-wattage phone tier while NFC claims the low-power accessory tier.
- Energous, whose FCC-approved three-foot charger targets yet another point in the power-distance envelope, now competes for mindshare in a landscape increasingly divided by wattage class.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, wireless power settles into a tiered structure — NFC for accessories, Qi for phones, at-distance systems like Energous for room-scale — with standards bodies racing to own each tier.
- Fragmentation pressure of the kind that forced the A4WP-PMA merger may eventually push smaller charging schemes into alliance with whichever radio standard already sits in the target device.
The trend: Wireless power is splitting into wattage-tiered domains, with each standards body — NFC Forum, Wireless Power Consortium, at-distance startups — claiming the device class its physics fits best.