It's not just a tiny piece of hardware, and if you consider that you need around 5V [typically more than 5v for today’s phones - Ed] to charge the phone it will certainly take up some space. Perhaps they will build it into an additional housing. Apparently Apple plans to use special technology of printing coils in dense layers onboard, but there still remain questions about the magnet. This can be used to produce a small amount of electrical energy, so don’t expect anything crazy. You certainly won’t be able to charge battery to 100% purely by this technology, at least not anytime soon. Similar devices are available on the market, you have flashlights that you need to shake and create electricity to make them work, there are also some quartz wristwatches that work in a similar way.

Rumors about Apple working on a new way of charging are not new, there were some last year, but we still didn’t see anything like that in smartphone sector. Something worth mentioning is that Apple has patents on all sorts of things, but not all of them end up in their products. This could be one of them, at least for now because they want to make their phones thinner and with this sort of technology that can’t be done. This is especially true if you consider the heat that is produced during the induction process in the coil. If they do manage to pull this off, giving at least an additional 20% on the battery life it could be very useful feature, especially if you went on a long trip with no charger around.

[Ed – as mentioned in this article, they concept of motion based magnetic inductive charging is not new at all. There are flashlights, radios, watches and more that use this. It is absurd that Apple is trying to patent someone else’s ideas AGAIN.  We are sure they will spin this to get people to think they invented this, but sadly this is just another case of Apple stealing someone else’s ideas and then patenting them thanks to the incompetent US Patent Office. What would be interesting would be to see if some of the people that actually invented this technology will get together to sue Apple for “slavish copying” of their tech…]
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