Bluetooth at Heart of A4WP-Backed Smart Wireless Charging Station

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) and Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP) signed a memorandum of understanding establishing a formal liaison between the groups to create the “smart wireless charging station” category of consumer electronics products. As the first step in the relationship, Bluetooth SIG issued a Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) to the A4WP for adoption in its baseline system specification. The unique number assigned to A4WP will enable streamlined communication between an A4WP charging pad and a smartphone over Bluetooth, Geoff Gordon, senior manager of product marketing for Qualcomm and A4WP marketing committee chairman, told us at a Bluetooth demo event in New York Wednesday.

Incorporating Bluetooth within the A4WP’s core spec allows more “smart” features in the protocol, Gordon said. Today, communication is limited to providing the charging state and how much time remains to fully fuel each phone on a charging pad, Gordon said. With Bluetooth Smart, third-party developers will be able to create apps that show nearby charging pad stations, the speed at which a pad can charge a device and any additional marketing information a merchant might want to provide such as a coupon for a purchase in a coffee shop equipped with charging pads, Gordon said. With third-party developers involved, there are a lot more “cool, futuristic technologies you can get,” he said, including social media tie-ins.

The addition of Bluetooth Smart brings personalized information to the charging process, Suke Jawanda, chief marketing officer of Bluetooth SIG, told us. If there are several devices charging, a user can set priority, for instance. A repeat customer to a coffee shop, who places a phone on an A4WP-equipped charging table, could order from the table directly using the smart data in the Bluetooth transmission that would recognize the user’s phone, he said. “It’s not just a dumb device, it’s your device,” he said.

PayPal recently announced it’s using Bluetooth Smart for payment beacons that will send out a low-power signal to any device with a PayPal app. PayPal calls the service, which is “coming soon,” an encrypted way for customers to pay “hands-free” without having to go to a cash register, Jawanda said. In the coffee shop scenario, Bluetooth Smart beacons would talk to compatible devices nearby and authenticate a transaction while the phone is charging on an A4WP-equipped table.

A4WP will open the Bluetooth Smart-enhanced spec to developers in the next couple of months, with products expected on the market early in 2014, Gordon said. The spec is open to A4WP’s 70-some members, which include Broadcom, Gill Industries, IDT, Intel, Qualcomm, Samsung, LG, HTC, Pantech and SEMCO, he said. The alliance expects a certification program to be in place by year-end. Creating the charging station infrastructure will be the job of member companies, Gordon said, saying Samsung, for one, has been active installing charging stations in airports. Gill Industries is part of the furniture and automotive industries, which offers installation possibilities beyond the typical airport and coffee shop locations, he said.

A4WP isn’t the only wireless charging standard Qualcomm supports among the platforms trying to gain traction. Qualcomm is also a member of the Wireless Power Consortium that’s behind the Qi standard, and it announced earlier this week it had joined the Power Matters Alliance, backed by Duracell Powermat and others, which is trialing wireless charging in select Delta Sky Club lounges and Starbucks locations.

That ecosystem “hasn’t expanded much” beyond trials, Gordon said of the latter, trying to avoid using the chicken-or-egg analogy. “When you put the pads in a lounge or coffee shop, people still need to have compatible phones or the accessories to get that to work,” he said. The trial solutions require a one-to-one relationship, he said, where there’s one charging spot to one phone and the two have to be “precisely lined up.” He called that approach “missing the mark” of what consumers are looking for. A4WP’s technology, by contrast, allows consumers to charge more than one device on a pad and not have to line devices up with the charging element. Those are the wireless charging features that will enable the ecosystem to develop, he said.

With Qualcomm involved in all three wireless charging platforms, it would seem natural that the semiconductor maker would support a common wireless charging platform to avoid segmentation that would prevent any of the platforms from taking off. “There’s been some speculation over the past couple of weeks that that might be happening,” Gordon said, “but the alliance is the alliance and the consortium is the consortium.” He said no active discussions are underway. Qualcomm positions its WiPower technology, meanwhile, as a charging solution for a wide range of devices “without the need to precisely position a device on a charging area."

A4WP is focusing on resonance-based wireless power technology versus Qi’s and PMA’s magnetic induction-based solutions. Samsung phones used to be based on the Qi wireless charging platform, but the Korean company, an A4WP founding member, switched to A4WP with the launch of the Galaxy S4 last spring (CED March 20 p5). The A4WP Alliance would like to see the other groups adopt its spec as a “resident-based solution” going forward, Gordon said. There’s been a “big spike” in the number of A4WP-based battery-packed covers and integrated devices coming to market, he said, “but it’s still a matter of messaging it out to the consumer and making sure it’s the right use case,” he said.