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Ikea's new furniture can charge your phone, no wires necessary

Ikea's new furniture can charge your phone, no wires necessary

By Dante D'Orazio

Source Wireless Power Consortium (PR Newswire) | Via Engadget

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Are you interested in tying down your furniture to a technology "standard" that's far from standard? Then you might be interested in some new products that will be on sale at Ikea in North America and Europe this spring. The Swedish furniture company has partnered with the Wireless Power Consortium, building Qi wireless device chargers into a line of lamps and other small pieces of furniture like bedside tables. You can also buy a small Ikea-designed pad to add Qi charging to any surface.

Ikea Qi wireless charging furniture

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For those who've been eagerly awaiting the arrival of wireless charging, the partnership is good news. However, the problem remains the same: two incompatible standards (the other is backed by Power Matters Alliance) remain at a stalemate. A number of devices, like the LG G3 and the Nexus 6, support WPC's Qi, but some major gains for PMA include Starbucks, AT&T, and McDonalds. The brand-new Galaxy S6 supports both standards. So there's no guarantee that your Ikea furniture will work with your next smartphone, but that's why they call it the bleeding edge, right?

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