I have the official wireless charging stand for Pixel 3, and FWIW, it doesn't seem to have problems charging it even if the phone is visibly tilted and off-center on the stand.
But perhaps that's exactly why it's a stand and not a mat - there are only so many ways to put a phone on it such that it stays there.
They're way better now, but I specifically only buy the Samsungs with fast charging that have a fan built in. I have to really mangle how it's put on the charger (like half of the phone hanging off the edge) to have any issues.
I've got a few of these for my old s8 and s10 and they work great. Only downside I can think of is when my battery is low and I need to keep taking the phone off the charger to respond to something, at that point I just cable it in so I can use it and charge at the same time. It's also of course not as fast as cabled fast charging so if I'm very low I'll cable it.
That's not incredibly frequent but does come up every few weeks.
I love them at my desks but I use cables everywhere else as I'm usually grabbing my phone to use it (like in bed).
Re:Apple Cancels AirPower Product
by Baeocystin on Friday March 29, 2019 @04:33PM
(#19525390)
I have one of those for my S8+. It's nominally better in terms of positioning tolerance than the old Qi charger I had for my Droid, but not by much. I still have to have the phone within a couple of millimeters of the left-right sweet spot for it to work.
I'm glad I have the charger, but it's still pretty fiddly. Maybe it has a wider range if you don't use a case, so that the back of the phone is closer to the mat.
Aside to those considering: it charges noticeably slower than the straight plug fast charge, but still faster than the old, non fast charge systems.
I'm using Xiaomi charger with iPhone 8 and it's exactly this: I just put phone there without any kind of aligning and it just works. Wonderful product, something so much in Apple style. Single device only, of course, but it's cheap enough to buy as many of those circles as needed. And it's barely producing any heat. May be they compromised charging speed, I'm not sure, I just put it there for night.
My impression of what AirPower was supposed to do was allow me to just throw my shit on the nightstand charging mat and the phone, watch, and earphones just magically charge without fiddling. Not being a hardware engineer, my impression was also that, in order to pull this off, involved big, hot coils and Apple couldn't get rid of the "hot" part.
So now the solution is to buy separate Qi pads for phone and earphone case, and I still need a proprietary charger for the Watch because it doesn't use Qi. Or just say "fuck it", and plug my phone and old AirPods case into the Lightning connectors I already have by the bed, and use the Apple Watch charging stand I already bought.
In summary, I'm one of those that would have spent the $200 on Apple kit if they could have pulled it off because I don't find Qi to be quite the solution I was looking for.