CES Highlights: PowerMat

Companies have been promising wireless power mats since the dawn of time. Essentially, these mats let you drop all of your gadgets onto one pad and will recharge them all simultaneously. At CES we got to check out what could be one of the first companies to deliver on that promise, PowerMat. The folks at PowerMat have created various pads that'll let you charge anything from your laptop to your BlackBerry simultaneously. In order for the mat to "recognize" and charge your battery-drained gadget, you'll have to encase it in a special skin (around $30 per skin). The skins magnetically latch onto the mats and chirp when a connection has been established. There are specific skins for various gadgets including the iPhone and BlackBerry Curve. Other devices like laptops and digital cameras will use a special receiver like the image shown on the right.


According to PowerMat, your devices will charge just as fast as they would if you had them plugged into a wall outlet and the PowerMats are more energy efficient since they do not waste energy and only work when a gadget is placed on them.

In the future, PowerMat's goal is to have their sensors embedded into all devices. The company was demonstrating a kitchen table with sensors embedded inside. When placed underneath a sensor, the table was powerful enough to charge a KitchenAid Mixer (without any wires!). Even more impressive, during the demo, they poured water onto the table, placed the mixer on top, and then put their hand in the water to demonstrate 1)how safe the technology is and 2)to show us that the pads will only charge devices with the sensors inside them. (The KitchenAid mixer had a sensor at the botton.)

Overall, I was impressed with what they showed. We're expecting to get review units in the next few weeks. No release date has been given for the pads (I'm guessing late March) and each pad will cost roughly $100.