Wireless battery charging is nothing new, and the market already offers a good number of compatible devices, but the problem is that they still have to stay very close to the charging base. Ossia wants to change that with its new Cota Forever Battery, an AA-format battery that can be recharged from a distance of 9 meters using a transmission method similar to WiFi. The company's priority is very low-power accessories; however, in the future it could become compatible with smartphones.
Cutting the Distance Chain
Imagine a remote control with batteries that never run out. Now move that potential to other small accessories: watches, smoke detectors, radios, the list goes on. Wireless charging technology is already among us, but in its current version it is little more than a simple trick, and most of the time it shapes up as a solution more inconvenient than convenient. Wireless charging will truly explode once the "chain" of distance is cut. That will definitely take time, but there are already several companies working on it, and one of them is Ossia. Its technology earned it the CES Innovation Award three years in a row, and what it just presented is the Cota Forever Battery.
At first glance it looks like any other AA battery on the market, but its entire casing houses an antenna and the electronics needed to receive power at a maximum distance of 9 meters. Ossia's CEO Mario Obeidat explained that in the same way a home has a router, it can also have a compatible Cota transmitter. That transmitter comes equipped with multiple antennas that allow it to modify the direction of its signals (at 2.4 GHz) and adapt to different obstacles, whether furniture, walls, or the user himself. The goal of the Cota Forever Battery is to create a compatibility bridge between all those low-power accessories in a home and the transmitter.
The Drawbacks: Size, Efficiency, and Standards
Here is where the problems begin. First of all, the transmitter is gigantic, and not very pleasant to look at. Then there are efficiency details: the company has said that two transmitters can cover a house of 280 square meters, but there are no numbers regarding charging speed, nor secondary technical data. There are also doubts about battery integrity, since the best rechargeable AA battery on the market supports 500 cycles (in the best of cases). Finally, standards: Qi Rezence, Open Dots, Apple's AirPower... Ossia could place itself above all of them if its technology works as promised, but it needs to hurry.
