The company is in the process of developing a smart dock that will allow laptops to wirelessly connect to both peripherals and monitors according to a recent blog post. That same blog shows us “Nate” and the future of wireless charging, connectivity, and data sharing. “Nate” goes about his day, next to the old “Nate” as a way of illustrating how much more simple “Future Nate’s” life will be through Intel engineering.
The dock that Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) is working on will toss out the need for DisplayPort and HDMI connectors and provide USB 3.0 speeds for the transfer of data to peripherals.
Throwing out the wires
“When you walk in the office with your laptop, it will automatically link with your wireless-enabled monitor or projector to deliver an HD streaming experience without the hassle of plugging into your HDMI or DisplayPort,” Intel said.
Intel is also working on “proximity-based peripheral syncing” where a wireless monitor would automatically start up when a laptop comes within a specified distance and could even use facial recognition rather than needing to type a password.
The bulk of this technology, according to the company, will use WiGig, a fast-growing multi-gigabit speed wireless communications technology that operates over the unlicensed 60 GHz frequency band. Intel is debating the merits of connecting mice and keyboards wirelessly with WiGig as well.At the June Computex show, Intel also showed those in attendance a laptop and smartphone being wirelessly charged by a table equipped with a charging via A4WP’s Rezence magnetic resonance technology.
Intel: Wireless laptop charging
While this wish for a wire-free life was first shown at the Computex trade show, Intel plans to talk about its goal next month in San Francisco when it hosts the Intel Developer Forum. It will also detail wireless docking on the vPro platform.
“If they don’t make investment like this, an old-school laptop starts looking really old,” said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research. “The goal of all this stuff is to make things seamless and transparent.” Essentially, Intel wants your laptop to resemble your tablet or smartphone while retaining its computing power and full keyboard.
It’s only a matter of time before wireless charging of laptops becomes a reality, the question, however, is whether or not the industry will embrace Rezence’s technology or Qi a different standard developed by the Wireless Power Consortium.
