Our first steps towards a wireless future?

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Wires

One of the standout features of the new Nokia Lumia 920 and Lumia 820 smartphones is that they can be charged wirelessly.

Rather than scrambling around for a power socket and untangling any wires, you will only need to put them on a charging plate to ensure that your Lumia is always ready for action.

An exciting range of funky accessories will also do the job for you, such as the FatBoy Charging Pillow or the JBL PowerUp music speaker.

Although wireless charging is not entirely new, these new Lumia smartphones from Nokia is giving the wireless charging ecosystem and the Qi standard a real boost.

The whole process makes life just a little bit easier, more convenient and fun. Isn’t that what great technology is supposed to do?

Wireless charging with the Lumia 800

Liberation

We only need to turn to our recent history, or indeed just look around our homes, to see what a difference going wireless can make.

Here are five examples of household objects that have been improved immeasurably since they got liberated from the tyranny of wires.

Remote controls

Yes, kids, believe it or not the early remote controls for your TV or video player were operated via a wire that was plugged into the said audio/visual unit.

You may snigger, but they were considered state of the art. Before wired remote controls you actually had to get up to change the channel on your TV.

The telephone

I was debating whether to include the telephone in this list – not a mobile phone, just the humble, home telephone. It seems too obvious and feels like cheating.

However, it is a fantastic example of wireless technology making a big difference to a common household gadget, so it deserves its place.

The Internet router

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

A small part of me feels nostalgic for those strange electronic beeps and squeaks that the dial-up modem used to make every time I wanted to ‘log-on’ to the Internet.

On reflection though, using a wireless router that lets me access the Internet from any room of my house, and from multiple devices, more than makes up for it.

DIY tools

Doing DIY is difficult enough; the last thing you need to worry about is finding a power point close enough for you to plug in your power tools. Plus, having wires lying across a hazardous work area is a health and safety accident waiting to happen.

The rechargeable and wireless drill (insert your work tool of choice) solved all such problems at a stroke.

Toys & games

This might seem minor, but the difference between a radio controlled car and one that was connected by a wire (so that you had to run after it, while you ‘drove’ it) is the difference between a good Christmas and a great Christmas.

Mind you, young people have done very well out of these wireless leaps forward. I had to plug a joystick into my computer to play games. It had suction pads (which were useless) to hold itself securely to the table. I could only dream of wireless video game controllers!

Tied by wires

Ethernet cables

Sadly, not everything around us can let go of their wires quite so easily.

Take a look around the back of your TV. If you have a cable box, a Blu-Ray player or a video games console connected to the back to of it, then you’ll probably have a maze of wires just like mine.

The same goes for your computer. How come, despite the advent of wireless keyboards, mice, speakers and even printers, it still takes so many wires to set up a computer?

Taken individually, the computer, TV and so on, these are all magnificent pieces of kit. I wonder how long it will be before they are all able to connect to each other without any wires at all? NFC and DLNA are steps in the right direction.

Let’s go back to where we first started. Nokia’s introduction of wireless charging on the Lumia 920, where it is built into the handset, and the Lumia 820, which will require one of the recharging shells.