Charging pad gadgets

One charging pad could power up all gadgets

Finding the right battery charger for your cellphone, digital camera, camcorder or PDA among the sea of anonymous black boxes that clutter our homes is a complete pain - as is finding a free socket when they all need charging at the same time. But this modern hassle could be short-lived.

Instead of each device needing its own charger, it may soon be possible to recharge phones and cameras by placing them on a plastic pad the size of a mouse mat. A dense array of coils buried in the pad will transmit energy to the gadget to charge its batteries. And it will be possible to charge as many gadgets as can fit on the pad at once, the inventors say.

The idea has been a long time in gestation. Splashpower, a spin-off company from the University of Cambridge, UK, has been promising to launch its SplashPad charger for the past three years. Now it has filed a series of patents showing how it will work. "It was a tougher challenge than we initially thought," Splashpower's co-founder James Hay admitted last week. "This is ground-breaking technology and that takes time."

On the face of it, this seems like an odd statement, as the principle is not new. Rechargeable electric toothbrushes, for instance, work similarly and have been around for years. These gadgets contain a coil that sucks power from a companion coil housed in a separate unit and connected to the mains.

And the idea of charging from a flat pad is not new either. While checking one of Splashpower's applications, the UK Patent Office found an electronics enthusiast's website that describes a wireless charger in which an electrical device (a wireless mouse) can be recharged by placing it in a precisely defined location on a mouse mat.