I got a Pixel 10 pro. One of its biggest new selling points it that it has Qi2 (basically a magnet in the back). This can sort of “snap” things to the phone that are magnetic.
But, some things are lost like reverse charging (being able to wirelessly charge other devices…that’s gone). I liked wirelessly charging stuff. I was the hero at the bar on a few occasions. Why should I care that my wireless charger now magnetically clamps to my phone? Just resting it on the charger worked fine before.
Yet I keep reading that Qi2 is the bomb. It is awesome and soooo cool an Android phone now has it. I liked the old way better. What am I missing?
The faster charging would be the selling point for me. My phone can handle 45w super fast charging, and regular Qi charging is something piddly like 7.5w. It’s super slow; so much so that I rarely bother in my vehicle and just use a car charger with the proper wattage and other charging circuitry (PPM/USB PD 3.0).
You can buy self-adhesive metal rings that stick to the back of your non-Qi phone. They do a great job of ensuring the phone centers properly on the charging base and stays there. They also greatly improve the magnetic coupling and hence efficiency in charging. Which seems to reduce the undesirable heating of the phone. E.g.
I have a Pixel 7, which doesn’t yet have the magnetic snap. So I got a third party Apple Magsafe case for it, and use a Magsafe car charger mount with it. This allowed me to just snap it onto the car charger for an immediate 100% fit every time. It wasn’t as fast as a cable, but fast enough to keep the phone charging through GPS and music use.
This was on an older car that didn’t have Android Auto yet.
So TLDR the magnets just allow more precise alignment to the wireless charging pad so you get a better, but still slower, charge. If you use a cable normally, this is useless to you.
The other thing it might allow is snap on accessories. In the iPhone world there are thin battery packs that just snap onto the back and charge your phone wirelessly. Not sure if Pixel 10 has those yet.
If I had a choice, I would choose to keep reverse charging over the magnet thing for my Samsung Flip. I also have a Samsung work phone and I use it as a spare battery pack pretty often.
I feel like this has been a small downside of the Android ecosystem for a long time now. iPhone Magsafe and compatible accessories have been around forever, and they work pretty well — much better than any sort of Qi, in my experience. Android meanwhile got a bunch of separate standards, some of which overlap with Qi 1 to some degree, some of which overlap with Qi 2 to some degree, but it’s really hard to remember what is what. Apple has like one unified wireless charging standard, and all the accessories work with each other. Android has like 6-7 and none of them work particularly well. I feel like this is one more thing that Google is just throwing at the wall and probably going to give up on by Pixel 11.
The Qi “standards” have been around in various forms for like 20 years, and most of the chargers you see around (like on old Starbucks tables and airport desks) are broken both by design and through poor reliability. Different Android and accessory vendors will have their own superset or subset of various Qi substandards. Similar situation in cars.
Qi 2 is supposed to help improve that… but so was Qi 1 in the first place. Android is just too fragmented =/
It’s like the USB-C vs Thunderbolt situation all over again.
Qi2 is MagSafe. Apple donated MagSafe to the Qi charging standards to turn into an open source standard. There’s some extremely minor differences but effectively, Qi2 is the open source name for MagSafe.
Thanks. I didn’t know that MagSafe is now open source. That’s a good thing. I’ve been using it on my iPhone for years now. When I travel for work, I use a standing charger that holds the phone in landscape mode on the nightstand and display a clock app at night. The phone gets charged while I can use my own phone as an alarm clock.
