The Perfect Charger (Almost)

Would you still want the power to fly, if you were required to put on a 117-piece set of chain mail before each flight? Would you still value instant teleportation, if you had to fill out a 72-page form before each jaunt? Would you still want control over the universe, if you had to power it by pedaling an exercise bike 14 hours a day?

In other words, how much inconvenience would you tolerate in exchange for a little magic? Thanks to a new product called the WildCharge mat, that question is no longer hypothetical.

www.wildcharge.com

The concept is irresistible: For $60, you get a thin pad that’s about the size of a typical mouse pad (8 x 6 inches). Its surface is covered by 12 shiny chrome stripes. Each day when you come home, you just set your cellphone, iPod and BlackBerry directly on the mat. They connect to it solidly with a subtle magnetic click — and you marvel as they begin charging automatically.

In other words, this single, sleek pad replaces the hideous mass of heavy, ugly, black power bricks that are currently required to recharge your mobile gadgets. (There’s a special circle of hell reserved for every electronics-company designer who’s ever shipped a product with yet another proprietary, mutually incompatible AC adapter brick.)

And since it can charge five doodads at once, the mat also reclaims four power outlets on your wall, freeing them up for more important jobs; the mat’s own power cord uses only a single wall socket. If you’re a business traveler, you’ll find the apparatus simpler and lighter to carry than a mess of black wall warts.

The first time you plop your BlackBerry or Razr onto the WildCharge and see it light up with the “battery charging” message, without your having had to fiddle with a single cord, plug or connector, you can’t help smiling. This, you think, is how things should work.

Now, WildCharge is not the only company pursuing the dream of cordless-recharging surfaces on desks, counters and bureaus. A number of companies are working on it — or have gone out of business trying.

WildCharge, however, is the first company to bring such a product to market. The difference, it says, is in the technology it uses. Its rivals are trying to incorporate something called wireless inductive power, where rapidly changing magnetic fields transfer the power. That’s how cordless electric toothbrushes get recharged. The advantage is that you don’t need visible metal contacts to conduct the power; the disadvantages are low efficiency, susceptibility to interference — and, evidently, difficulty bringing a product to market.

The WildCharge uses conductive power, meaning that the little metal charging terminals on your phone, iPod, or whatever come in direct contact with the charging mat’s metal strips. There’s no radiation. There are no magnetic fields, either, so there’s no danger to credit cards, hard drives or videotapes. And there are no electric shocks; if flesh, liquid or some metal object touches the metallic strips on the pad, the power cuts off instantly (yes, I tried it, and felt nothing but relief). The charging resumes once the offending object, puddle or limb is removed.

All right, so the charging mat works like a charm, it solves all kinds of problems and it’s wicked cool. So what about the trade-off — the WildCharge’s equivalent of the chain mail, the exercise bike and the 72-page form?

The problem is that the electricity somehow has to find a pathway from the charging pad to the gadget. Any WildCharge-compatible gadget has four tiny raised nubbins on its back panel, metal pinhead contacts strategically arranged so that they’ll get the necessary power no matter how sloppily you toss the device onto the pad. Unfortunately, no gadgets are made that way today.

Therefore, you have to retrofit each of your existing appliances with back-panel contact dots — at a price of $35 apiece. For the BlackBerry Curve and BlackBerry Pearl, you get a rubbery silicone “skin” that slips over the phone like a galosh. Not only does this skin have the requisite contact points on the back, but it doubles as a handy protective case for the BlackBerry itself.

CONTINUED : Just a few quibbles...

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