Just a couple of hours after the announcement, there are already a zillion places where you can read about Samsung’s new Galaxy S6 phone. We can affirm that it’s a nice piece of gear. But what’s important for wearables is not the phone itself but one of its features: wireless charging.
The S6 supports wireless charging with the two major standards: WPC (the Qi specification) and PMA. Wireless charging is hardly new. If you were paying attention, you’ll remember that Intel showed wireless charging about this time last year when it starting talking about the Edison wearables development platform, and Intel is not a particular pioneer in this space.
But Samsung sells a lot of phones. And Ikea sells a lot of furniture, some of which will now support wirelss charging. And while we’re not exactly conspiracy theorists here at WTI, we do know that two data points make a trend, and there are starting to me a bunch of data points around wireless charging. It’s something that the wearables industry might want to keep careful track of, because it looks to us like — the way it happens to a lot of “overnight successes” — wireless charging may suddenly become a Thing.