The Wireless Power Consortium (WPC), creator of the Qi wireless charging standard, gets an unexpected board of directors addition-- Qualcomm, the company behind the Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP).
"We encourage competitors to join and we create the conditions in which standards developments is fast and fair," the WPC says in comment to the announcement.
The WPC board consists of 24 so-called "regular member" companies, including HTC, LG, Nokia, Panasonic, Sony, Texas Instruments and Verizon, among others.
Qualcomm joining the WPC leads to a question-- will the WPC and the A4WP start working together to improve the Qi standard? While 170 companies (the makers of around 330 device) back Qi it still has issues-- it only provides up to 5W of power, making it unusable with larger devices such as tablets or laptops.
The A4WP take on wireless charging features up to 24W of output, even if the WPC is working to push the Qi specification to 15W. The two standards vary somewhat-- the A4WP technology allows the simultaneous charging of devices with different power requirements on the same pad, while Qi maximises efficiency with one-to-one control.
Qualcomm also has an own wireless charging technology, WiPower LE, found in the recently launched Toq smartphone.