I don’t personally own any wireless charging products, but I always get excited when I see other peoples’ gear. There’s a wireless phone charging pad I keep seeing that looks like a cool magic summoning circle, and I cannot get that piece of nerdy tech into my life fast enough. But the first wireless charging device I might find in my home could be for my Switch Joy-Cons.
Shown off at CES by a company called Powercast, it’s a device which plugs into your mains socket that emits an RF field (shown working from two feet in the CES demo, but with claims of an 80 feet maximum range). You then pop your Joy-Cons into a controller grip which converts that RF field into electricity, stores it in a battery, and uses it to charge your Joy-Cons as you’re playing.
This is really interesting as a concept, mainly because most wireless charging products right now still need you to pop your device down onto a specific spot. You can place your phone on a mat to charge it, but you can’t sit on the sofa with it charging in your hand. The fact that the first consumer-focused truly wireless option we’ve seen is for Switch controllers is very unexpected indeed.
We don’t know how much these charging setups will cost yet, but they’re aiming to release between July and September of 2019. The technology could theoretically charge as many devices as you want within its range, so it’ll be interesting to see if Powercast try to charge more than just your Switch controllers in the future.
This post originally appeared on Kotaku UK, bringing you original reporting, game culture and humour from the British isles.
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