Swedish furniture giant IKEA has partnered with Qi to produce the “Home Smart” collection – a series of desks, tables, and lamps featuring an integrated pad which can charge smartphones and tablets wirelessly. By simply placing your phone on top of the pad, it will start to charge. If the upcoming line of furniture isn’t to your taste, fear not – IKEA has also promised to sell stand-alone pads to attach to your existing furniture.
Integrating wireless charging into furniture should allow us to reduce the number of messy cables and wires tangled around our houses, but there’s some doubt about whether wireless charging will damage phone batteries, and also about the ecological impact of the new gadget, as recycling these devices could be difficult, as they’d have to be separated from the furniture they’re built into. For now, the chargers work with Samsung Galaxy, Google Nexus 6, and some others, but for now iPhone users will have to use an adapter. Keep your eyes out in mid April when the products will first be released in Europe and North America.
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