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Thread: Is wireless charging bad for phones?

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    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Kobold

    Join Date
    May 2009

    Default Is wireless charging bad for phones?

    Brief aside, before I get on with the actual question:
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    I really hate it when Googling a question gives me 15 authoritative answers, all unanimously on the same side, and none of them addresses the question I actually typed in.

    Because when I ask Google this question, it tells me in very... patient, ABC terms that no, wireless charging is not bad for phone batteries. Did I ask about batteries? I did not. I carefully left the word "battery" out of the query entirely. I don't understand batteries, and I don't care, as far as I'm concerned they're chemistry and chemistry is witchcraft, I'm happy to take the advice of people who understand that stuff but I have no aspiration to be one of them. No, I want to know about the rest of the phone.

    And not one of these oh-so-reassuring-buy-our-tat-now merchants even mentions that.

    OK, enough ranting. Sorry. Now to the serious question.

    My partner's iPhone display weirded out a few months ago. We got it fixed, but last week it broke down again. So the heck with that, it's new iPhone time. But my partner had, for over a year now, been charging the old iPhone using a third-party wireless charger (because the original, wired connector was getting worn and frayed). Is it possible that that may have contributed to its abrupt breakdown?

    Intuitively, it seems to me that an electromagnetic field that's strong enough to induce enough current to recharge a phone's battery, must inevitably also induce currents in all other parts of the phone as well.

    Now, in most components - basically, each individual chip - the components are miniscule and therefore so will the currents be, rendering them unnoticeable. But there's one big exception: the screen controller. This is (inevitably) about as big as the screen itself, more than big enough (I imagine) to get quite an appreciable current flowing. It may even be more than the component itself is designed or tested to handle.

    Someone, somewhere must know about this. I imagine some manufacturers have even tested it. But Google won't tell me about it, because the answer is drowned out by these spam merchants trying to sell me tat, who are, unanimously, being suspiciously specific in their cast-iron guarantees that it won't harm the battery.

    Does anyone here know anything relevant to the actual answer?
    Last edited by veti; 2024-04-29 at 04:38 AM.
    "None of us likes to be hated, none of us likes to be shunned. A natural result of these conditions is, that we consciously or unconsciously pay more attention to tuning our opinions to our neighbor’s pitch and preserving his approval than we do to examining the opinions searchingly and seeing to it that they are right and sound." - Mark Twain