Near Field Communication (NFC) has been around for some time and has been wildly been used in contactless payments and allowing two devices to communicate. The NFC Forum has announced an update for the short-range wireless technology that and can now support some form of wireless charging to the standard. With these new changes, it is believed that future Near Field Communication devices could offer wireless charging functionality, albeit in a way that’s far more limited than the popular Qi standard used by almost every other device.
It will come as no surprise that the new wireless standard will charge devices much slower than that the existing Qi charging, offering up to 1W speeds compared to base Qi speeds of 5W. (Qi fast charging can reach speeds of 10W-30 W or more on standard hardware.) And it’ll require new hardware — you won’t be able to just get a firmware update and suddenly be able to have NFC-based wireless charging on your current device.
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NFC wireless charging speeds are so slow compared to Qi, so one might wonder why anyone would bother to use NFC charging at all. But the key idea behind the new Near Field Communication standard is not that it’ll be used to replace Qi charging on things like power-hungry smartphones, but rather complement it.
Unlike the popular Qi standard, which Near Field Communication wireless charging requires physically large coils to transmit power between devices, the new wireless charging specification WLC standard, as it’s formally called, for NFC allows for a single antenna to manage both communications and charging for a device. The idea is that smaller devices like headphones, fitness trackers, or smartwatches — all of which often already feature NFC antennas for connectivity — could use the new Near Field Communication-based standard for charging on the go using similarly NFC-equipped smartphones as reverse-wireless chargers.
Even if the WLC standard has been officially added to the NFC specification it will still take time for hardware companies to implement the new charging tech, assuming its worth their effort.
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