Wireless Charging For iPhone is Coming

Financial analysts and Wall Street followers who have criticized and projected that Apple has already reached its "peak" ay soon soon find themselves in an interesting predicament.

There is little question that Apple’s meteoric iPhone sales growth will slow down a bit and even decline in 2016. Apple has already acknowledged as much when it reported results from its Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad, Record-Breaking Quarter. But if these critics think growth is over at Apple, they have another think coming. And if they think Apple's core iPhone business is on the brink of decline, they have not been paying attention at all.

This year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) certainly had some highlights, but it was during CES 2015 that the public saw the future. A future where everything around is connected. Of course, all of those connected devices need power and not everything is stationary, so one of the most exciting companies they saw at CES 2015 was a small startup called Energous.

Current-generation wireless charging solutions like Qi are nice. A smartphone equipped with the required hardware can simply be placed on a charging pad, or on anything with a built-in wireless charger, and its battery will begin to recharge. It is more convenient than fussing with cables but it is not quite as exciting as the technology that will refuel all of our devices in the future.

No, that technology will look much more like the product Energous has created.

Dubbed WattUp, Energous has built a two-part system that allows practically any type of device to be recharged wirelessly from distances of up to 15 feet. Anything that has integrated a tiny Energous receiver chip will be able to utilize this exciting technology, and the chip is so small that it won’t add any thickness to devices like smartphones, tablets, smartwatches or laptop computers.

Think about what that means. With an Energous transmitter in the office, everyone's phone will constantly be charging even while it’s in their pocket as they sit at their desk and work. With a transmitter in the living room, user's phone will charge while it sits on the couch beside them.

Now, here’s where things get interesting. There is a good amount of evidence out there to suggest that Energous has landed a major partner with which it will bring its technology to market, and that its partner is Apple. IDisruptive Tech Research analyst Louis Basenese did all the heavy lifting already.

If Apple has secured an exclusive deal with Energous to bring WattUp to future iPhones though, Apple's upcoming smartphone lines are going to change the game more than one can even imagine. this means the biggest technological advancement in smartphones since Apple released the original iPhone in 2007 and brought touch-based mobile computing to the masses.

The implications for the user experience are obvious, though they were made no less exciting by that fact. The immediate impact will remove the need to be proactive in charging the iPhone — it will just happen. And in the long term as the technology improves and proliferates, people won’t ever even have to think about charging their devices again.

But the implications for Apple’s bottom line should be just as compelling for investors. Apple could be the first company to bring this technology to the masses. If consumers buy this new iPhone, they will never have to plug it in again.

Apple’s upcoming iPhone 7 may not include Energous technology, but this isn't some far off dream. In fact, a WattUp-equipped iPhone in the next year or two isn’t unthinkable at all; Energous has previously stated that WattUp technology could feasibly launch in commercial devices by late 2016 or early 2017.