Powermat, Starbucks Extend Their Wireless Charging Deal Amid Standards Battle

Following a trial run in the Boston and San Jose markets, Duracell Powermat and Starbucks said Thursday they've begun a national rollout of Powermat wireless charging counters, with a launch in Starbucks stores in San Francisco. The companies plan to expand Powermat wireless charging -- a free service -- to more major markets next year, with a full rollout in counters in Starbucks company-owned stores and Teavana Fine Teas + Tea Bars “planned over time."

The announcement comes as standards are competing to be the dominant wireless charging for everything from furniture to embedded designs in smartphones. It’s a murky field as many industry players are members of more than one -- and some all three -- alliances.

Duracell Powermat is part of the Power Matters Alliance (PMA), which uses an inductive resonance technology for charging. Phones have to be placed precisely aligned with coils located beneath a surface. The Wireless Power Consortium’s Qi standard is based on an incompatible inductive charging technology. PMA President Ron Resnick told us last week that Starbucks charging stations could easily be updated to also work with charging mechanisms for the Rezence charging technology from the Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP), which uses magnetic resonance and allows for what A4WP calls more “spatial freedom.” PMA and A4WP announced an alliance in the spring where each will license the other’s technology depending on application.

"The good news is that the PMA is making real strides working with the Rezence team to make sure that the two standards will ultimately be interoperable and coalesce together, Schreiber told us, saying Starbucks’ commitment “is entirely to the PMA.” He called Thursday’s Starbucks news a “watershed” event for wireless charging standards: “Once a player like Starbucks puts 100,000 charging spots out there, I think standards wars pass from the world and people start coalescing around what’s actually out there rather than arguing about theoretical standards.”

Schreiber compared Starbucks’ potential influence on Powermat to the nascent Wi-Fi market in 2001 when Starbucks began offering free Wi-Fi in stores before its name had been trademarked. Wi-Fi “was not an obvious choice” at a time when multiple standards, led by HomeRF, were competing to be the wireless networking standard, he told us Thursday. “Within months of Starbucks’ announcement that they're going to put Wi-Fi in every store, the standards disappeared” and Wi-Fi became the de facto standard, Shreiber said, perhaps in an effort diffuse the argument that PMA has very little device or accessory penetration in the market today. “Only one of the PC makers in the world was using Wi-Fi” when Starbucks launched with it, he said, saying users had to use dongles to connect to a network.

Of the 20 million consumer devices that shipped with wireless charging capability last year, however, “nearly all were built with the competing Wireless Power Consortium (WPC) Qi specification,” said Ryan Sanderson, associate director-Power Supply & Storage Components-IHS, Thursday following the PMA announcement. Most of those were embedded in mobile devices including the Google Nexus 4 and 5 smartphones, the Google Nexus 7 tablet and several models in Nokia’s Lumia line, Sanderson said. “These devices will not be compatible with the wireless chargers due to be installed in Starbucks stores,” he said.

But PMA-enabled devices are beginning to roll out. Since May, Sprint and Virgin Mobile U.S. have been selling the Kyocera Vibe, “a low-end smartphone,” with embedded PMA charging, Sanderson said. AT&T is offering an upgrade for the Samsung Galaxy S5 supporting PMA and an add-on case for the iPhone is available from Duracell Powermat, he said. But, he said, the number of devices in the market that are compatible with Powermat compared with those built to the Qi specification is “still minimal.”

The A4WP’s Rezence standard, due to be released for certification to device makers in December, presents an additional option for wireless charging, and its technology isn’t compatible with either of the other two. That could impede the progress of wireless charging overall, Sanderson said, as “conflicting and competing standards continue to create uncertainty for OEMs and ODMs looking to adopt wireless charging.”

Starbucks didn’t respond to questions, including whether it will sell PMA accessory cases or dongles that would enable customers to charge wirelessly if they don’t have a compatible device. Schreiber said Powermat has brought out a $9.99 dongle with a micro USB or iPhone connector that users plug into a phone to enable “any device” to charge wirelessly. “Likely the next phone they get will have it built in,” Schreiber said of smartphone owners, “but the phone they have today will be able to charge fine with a Powermat ring.” Initial pilots at Starbucks stores in Europe and Asia are expected within the year, the company said.