Qi2 wireless charging upgrade will bring the best of Apple’s MagSafe to Android phones

Wireless charging has agreed upon the Qi standard for several years now as the technology has become more and more widely used in smartphones, but there’s still room for differentiation in the standard. One of the biggest upgrades to Qi came from Apple’s MagSafe, and that’s now coming to other devices with “Qi2.”

The Wireless Power Consortium today announced Qi2, the next version of the Qi wireless charging standard. The new standard will launch later this year and focuses on a new magnetic element which helps devices to align with charging pads.

If that sounds familiar, it’s one of the core benefits that Apple’s MagSafe, introduced on the iPhone 12, brought to the company’s smartphones. Apple’s version uses a ring of magnets to align the charger for the most efficient charging. The WPC says that Qi2’s “Magnetic Power Profile” was based on Apple’s design but was developed by Apple and other WPC members.

WPC member, Apple^®, provided the basis for the new Qi2 standard building on its MagSafe^® technology. Apple^® and other WPC members developed the new Magnetic Power Profile, which is at the core of Qi2. Qi2’s Magnetic Power Profile will ensure that phones or other rechargeable battery-powered mobile products are perfectly aligned with charging devices, thus providing improved energy efficiency and faster charging.

Effectively, when this new standard becomes widely available, we’ll be seeing the same ideas presented in MagSafe in Android smartphones. We’ve seen third-party cases emulate some of those features, but this official support ought to prove interesting to say the least. The WPC also says that this change could open wireless charging to new form factors that “wouldn’t be chargeable using current flat surface-to-flat surface devices.”

It remains unclear what the first smartphones or chargers will be with Qi2, but the WPC says to expect those to arrive in time for the holidays this year.

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