Wireless charging has gone from a relative rarity to almost total ubiquity in the last decade, becoming a reliable and easy part of our everyday technological lives.
Throughout that process Qi charging has been a useful marker of quality, letting you know that a wireless charger will perform to a certain standard. Now, Qi2 has been unveiled, and we’ve got all the key details about what it actually means.
What is Qi2?
Qi2 wireless charging is effectively a new standard in wireless charging, one that all sorts of manufacturers and companies will be able to match with their chargers.
The big change compared to the first generation of Qi chargers is magnets, to clamp the charger onto your device for a more reliable connection. If you’re thinking that sounds like Apple’s MagSafe system, you’d be dead right.
In fact, Apple has worked hand in hand with the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC) that created Qi2 to make sure it takes advantage of its design work.
The WPC says that the new system will allow for increases in wireless charging speeds down the line – something that Apple hasn’t really gone after with its own MagSafe, but which is far more of a dream for Android phone owners.
When does Qi2 arrive?
Because this is a new standard, technically it’s already here – the WPC has announced it and detailed it, and manufacturers will have it as a guideline now.
So, its start date is a little fuzzy, but we should hopefully start to see new phones arrive with compatibility for Qi2 pretty soon.
What phones support Qi2?
For now, Qi2 has very thin support in terms of actual phones that you can buy, which is no surprise, since it’s only been around for a relatively short while.
However, we’d assume that we’ll get a wave of phones that support it, along with chargers and cases to complete the circle, in late 2023 or 2024.
Of course, on the iPhone side of things, Apple’s pre-existing support for MagSafe means that its phones already have supported something very close to Qi2 since the iPhone 12, so that shouldn’t change moving forward.
