Hi. All right, you can all stop tweeting me and emailing me about the Xiaomi Me Air Charger. We're going to take a look at it and six reasons and more. Why it's guaranteed to fail.

Just like all the other wireless charging technologies that we've looked at here, U-beam now called Sonic Energy. Oh God, let's let's not go to U-beam It's an Eev blog fan favorite. Uh, the infrared we Charge system. We got energy.

anyone remember that from like 10 years ago? Uh, Air Volt, which was a kickstartery thing. We've got Energist. They made it to the stock market. Um, and so it's just plummeting right down as it should because it's never going to be practical Aussia.

and there's like probably a dozen different wireless like phone charging technologies. It's the Holy Grail. Everyone keeps trying to develop a new wireless charging system for phones. Why? Anyway, let's get into it.

Six reasons and more. Why this thing is guaranteed to fail and be impractical. It Basically, it's not going to happen. Okay, so first of all, does this, uh, Xiaomi Mi Air Charging technology actually work? well? Yes, it does.

All of these are charging technologies will work in quote marks, but it's all about all the issues to do with this. About practicality of the thing. They're going to guarantee to fail because they're simply impractical. So here's the promo video for it.

and as you can see, it's this huge gigantic box and big cube that you actually sit on the floor of your living room. It's targeted for in-home use and it's designed to. You know you walk around with your shoe phone in your house because you're still. You know when you want to come home, you just want to be staring at your shoe phone, right? Because that's what people do these days.

Cheers! There's a world happening around you anyway, right? You're walking around and it's just magically charging as you walk past it as you're sitting there, etc. And it uses millimeter frequencies. We'll get into that and it's got 144 antenna on it. Here's a photo of the antennas.

We'll also get into that and it's got uh, 14 antennas in the receiver for the phone. but you'll notice that in none of this promotional video. do they actually show you like a real phone actually working. So this could be complete pie in the sky stuff.

I'm sure there's a working prototype somewhere, but I don't think this is. It doesn't seem to be anything close to release, so it actually has positional technology because it needs to know in your room where your phone is so that it can then uh, beam steer beam form the millimeter frequency Rf energy to the phone that you're actually holding. So it claims to have 144 antennas in the on the transmit side and 14 in the phone side. So okay, it's some sort of millimeter wavy type Rf uh power transfer technology with active Uh beam forming.

So okay. this is how the new R5g technology works. so it's basically a similar sort of thing to modern 5g uh cell tower technology, but designed to deliver a like instead of data to your phone. It's designed to deliver power, so it's almost certainly operating in some sort of continuous wave uh system Which actually is a good thing because that can actually make it more efficient if you optimize it for uh, continuous wave transmission.

So if you just put in all of your power into the beam just to transmit uh to the device to power it, then you can actually design your amplifiers to be more efficient. You can design your antennas to be more efficient and design the whole system to be more efficient. But just like all the other wireless technologies we've looked at here, efficiency is the killer in this whole thing. So they claim to be able to deliver five watts up to sev up to several meters uh, from the device.

Which isn't much, I mean just the other side of the lab is more than a couple of meters. This is not a very big lab. This is like, you know, like big mansions these days it's not going to go far at all. So anyway, 5 watts up to a couple of meters.

Now here is where the efficiency comes in. Okay, 5 watts is in like, fairly slow charging technology for a phone. Like with your ultra rapid uh charges. These days, it's like, yeah, an order of magnitude slower than what's currently on the market.

Well, that's one of the things we'll look at. So the question is, how much energy do you have to put into this system? I.e draw from the mains power point that this thing's plugged into to deliver 5 watts into your shoe phone under ideal conditions? Well, it turns out this is not necessarily my area of expertise, so I called up a mate of mine, Sharia, from the signal path his Youtube channel is linked in down below. Absolutely fantastic, Cutting edge all about. He's one of the world's leading millimeter wave researchers at Bell Labs, and I've done a Uh Amp hour podcast with him linkedin down below as well where we talk about 5g, uh technology.

It goes for an hour. It's fantastic. Highly recommended, and both of us came to pretty much the same conclusion that if you can put 5 watts into your shoe phone at a couple of meters using anything less than 500 watts input power into the transmitter, then well, it's going to be some remarkable whiz-bang technology. Now here's a photo of the antennas used in this and Sharia says these look like a dual polarized circular patch antennas.

Nothing special there at all, fairly ordinary and he says 144 is not many. so to get the narrow beam forming required requires a large number of antenna and 144 doesn't give you a very narrow Uh beamforming beam. So right there it's like pretty limited and you'll notice that they're actually through hole. You can see the pin coming through and Sharia says there's absolutely no way that this is going to work from a single integrity point of view at millimeter millimeter wavelength.

This is which is what his research is, So that would be uh, 28 gigahertz and beyond. So he seems to think that this really, this actual antenna that they show here in their video is probably more likely around the 5 gigahertz ism band something like that. So it's much lower than millimeter wave. Anyway, Sharia says there's no way that you can, uh, construct an antenna like that and have it work at millimeter wave frequencies.

It's just it's the wrong technology. So how much loss are you going to get in the system? Well, that depends uh, upon your uh, path loss in air. And I've looked up some data here and it seems to be about uh, 32 db minimum at for one meter, that's just one meter and then of course it drops further with more distance. But then you've got uh, your transmitter antenna again and then you've got your receiver antenna gain as well.

So when you combine those two, Sharia seems to think are probably in the order of like 15 db loss. Something like that because they are getting some sort of obvious uh benefit from the antenna gain because at five watts uh output, if you looked at just the uh transmission loss of the air itself, if you were losing like 32 db or more, there, you're looking at like 1500 times, so you'd need like five kilowatts plus to put into this system to receive five watts on your shoe phone. And then you've got the efficiency of the receiver as as well. And Sharia says, if you can do uh, 50 efficiency at like five gigahertz, that kind of uh, you know, really, that's really difficult to do because you've got to convert the Rf, you've got to rectify that and convert it into Dc.

So he's being generous and saying, well, you know there's at least 50 percent lost there Right off the bat, just in the reception. We're going to be generous and say, 500 watts is the input power required to get 5 watts into this device that's under ideal condition. Like in practice, it's probably more than that. And there's a reason why the box has to be this big like this.

It's going to have a large power supply in it. And then you get to the practicalities of the box if you've got uh, just 144 antenna. I assume that's just one array, because that's already an incredibly small array for beamforming at these sort of Uh frequencies. So is that only on one side of the box? or is it on three sides of the box? Because it's got like a wanky little Lcd display on one side, so presumably there's nothing there and does it actually have one of those on each side? Or is there some sort of like internal panel that just like rotates with a motor or something like that, and then scans around? I don't know.

Anyway, there's some sort of technology that allows them to actually find the phone. So the they could phone could actually be like, maybe transmitting an incredibly, uh, small power signal. And then they could be in that array. Um, to actually do some reception as well.

And then they can like locate where the phone is. But anyway, Sharia says, um, even the best, uh, phased array like this, you're only going to get about a 60 degree beam angle. It's not going to go completely 90 degrees. It's not going to go behind.

So if you've only got one flat surface like that, you're only going to get 60 degrees either side. So it's not huge. I mean, this is not just going to magically, you know, fill the entire room. so it's got to actually be receiving about 10 watts at the phone.

Uh, just because of the 50 uh efficiency losses in the Rf to Dc rectifier. Uh, to do this. So it's You know. it's even worse than what we're making out here.

So it could be like a best case. You need to transmit like a kilowatt instead of 500 watts and Sharia says that, uh, trying to rectify Uh, 10 watts at like 5 gigahertz? Something like that, that starts to give you the heebie-jeebies. That's actually really big Rf power level for rectification like that. So regardless of how they're actually implementing this, uh, technically, it doesn't really matter.

Yes, it works, But we have to get into all the reasons why it's never going to work in the market. It's simply not practical, and it's probably not even ethically right to actually develop and try and market and sell a product that's going to be this inefficient to dry to just to charge your mobile phone. It's just ridiculous. Anyway, let's get into the six uh, reasons why this thing.

It just simply is not going to be practically in the market. It's not going to be a practical product. It's guaranteed to fail if this whiteboard looks familiar. It's because I practically copied the whole six points from our good friends.

You beam over here. My Ub debunking biggest shock horror. Wireless charging technology has the same issues regardless of what technology you use. Whether it's ultrasound, whether it's infrared, whether it's uh, like air energy that was like Wi-fi or any of the Rf ones, the energies, the Ossia, and this new, um, me air charging thing, it doesn't matter.

It comes down to the same practical, uh, design, engineering, and basically marketing considerations. Let's go. First of all, we've got. the efficiency efficiency will be bad, right? This is bad for the planet.

Imagine if everyone got one of these for their homes. 500 watts, maybe a kilowatt or something like that to maybe get you know, five watts at best into your phone. Oh come on. So right off the bat there, that is just a huge no.

This product. You should Not buy this product even if it worked, even if existed and you could buy it. You should not buy it because you don't want a huge amount of power. And how much standby power does this thing take? It's not going to be like half a watt.

like a little, uh, you know, Qi charger, pad and wall wart and things like that. This is the reason that we have regulations for these sorts of things we've got That you might have heard like the energy star compliance. The Meps regulations there, like Australian and New Zealand. Other countries leave in the comments down below.

if your country's got something similar where, uh, you know, the efficiency of the product matters. You can't actually sell a product into certain markets unless it meets efficiency requirements. and this is a huge reason why all these switching, uh, plug packs, They had to get them under a watt. For example, because all these uh, wall walls, you know, stuck everywhere you have, you know, dozens of them throughout your home.

They actually use a lot of like passive power consumption when they're sitting there idle doing nothing. Imagine what this huge box is doing. Unbelievable. So right there.

the ethics of everyone using are like this huge fight. You know, 500 watt to plus uh box to just charge their phone at a like at snail's pace. Really? five watts is nothing these days. Then we've got the cost of the thing, the physical size of it, the weight of it.

You've got to ship this thing. You've got a design. You've got to build all the plastics and everything. So all of this to design this huge product that's like orders of magnitude inefficient.

I was like, oh why Then you've got the size. Who the heck wants this huge box like this in your house And as we've discussed, you probably need like multiple ones of these in multiple rooms. Cost like multiple boxes, multiple sizes. They sit in your home.

It's got. If you have a look at one of the photos here, it's weird. It's got some sort of like, uh, transparent thing around the bottom. some other photos don't show and it's got a little thing in the middle.

Looks like a little strobe light or something. Is that something to do with the positional technology or something? I don't know. They're going to integrate bloody bluetooth speakers into it or something. Maybe it's a subwoofer.

Fourth one, Safety and legality. Now Sharia says that potentially this can be safe because if you want to know about the safety of to the true safety of 5g systems, listen to the podcast that we did and we talked about all about 5g technology, how it works, and how it's actually safe. Because it doesn't actually penetrate the skin, it's really difficult to penetrate anything. That's why 5g technology needs so many towers and so close.

Because yeah, it can penetrate stuff. But then the attenuation drops and then your efficiency drops to bugger all. So they do say in their marketing for this thing that it can penetrate objects. But yeah, penetrate.

They don't tell you what the attenuation is, just imagine you've got your phone like this. It's ideally positioned so that it's you know, flat. It's facing the receiver and you you beam with. Okay, you.

Let's say your antenna array takes up half. There's got to be 14 uh elements on here, so let's just say it takes up half your phone. Let's just assume that it's round like this. We're not going to talk about the side low.

We're not going to talk about all the ins and outs of it, but let's assume that it's round like this. And because of the 50 minimum rectification. uh, efficiency in this thing. Um, you've got to pump at least 10 watts into an area this size.

So if I'm holding my shoe phone like this and the transmitter's over there, I don't really want 10 watts of focused Rf energy pumping into me like this. No thanks. But anyway. Sharia, one of the world's leading experts on this, seems to think that he's he's going to give it to them that they can make it safe and the legality of it having a 500 watt transmitter and see once again, he's willing to grant them.

Uh, that they can solve you, get Fcc approval, They can get all the other approvals and everything else. So like, we'll give that to them, right? Let's just say it can be made safe and it can be made legal. Number five. How people actually use phones.

You hold your phone in your hand like this, right? I hold in the bottom like this. So let's just say that the sensor array has to be up the top right? then? Well, okay, um, what happens if the sensor's right there, right down the camera and we're well, we're like this. We're all good. It works.

You know you can test this in the lab and show it to the marketing people and they go, yay, let's sell it, It works. And then the engineers go like this: ah, doesn't work anymore Or you're going to put your shoe phone in your pocket, you're going to have it in your bag. Or you're just going to like everyone does, lie it on the table like this: be at a kitchen table or whatever. Like it's It's not going to get anything.

The attenuation is going to be so enormous you'd be getting like milliwatts into the thing, not 5 watts, which is already low enough. Oh, and I think it's important that I actually put up there like if you get five watts out of this thing and 500 watts in, that's you know, one percent efficient. Just saying. And the final nail in the coffin for this thing is the competition.

Your phone already has Chi charger built into it. It's not the best thing, but it works. It's already built in whereas this thing requires you to have another case which you put on the outside of your phone eve and then it's got to like plug into your Usb or then it's got to be like built into the phone. So they'd have to tee up with the manufacturers and they're not going to give up the Qi charging.

so they're going to have to have the 14 array elements built into the phone. As if already, our phones weren't chock full of already other uh stuff. And so you've got to integrate 14 antenna in there as well as the big uh chi charging coil as well. And no god no.

Anyway, cheese cheap, right? You can get like a five bucks delivered, delivered and sure it's not got the best alignment, but it works. You know you can get better Qi charging pads. Apple have the new magnetic wanky thing to try and put it in place to get extra efficiency. Anyway, these things already exist are already built into your phone.

Their audio print chi is pretty uh efficient. Like it's Like up in the order of like, you know, 70 percent, uh, 80 something like that. It's pretty darn good. And then you've got to compete against the other rapid charging uh, technologies available.

Like it all comes down to how you practically use this thing. You know you come home, your phone's low, you're not just gonna sit there on the couch slowly charging at five watts, being bombarded with all this Rf energy and hoping that you get your five watts. uh, charging. It's just it's because it's not going to show it on your phone.

it's just going to show or charge in. Yeah, at what rate, you know. So it's just going to be an absolute crapshoot. Whereas if you know if you come home at night and you just plug it in and with you on to your rapid charger, it's like it's done in like an hour or something like that, you just leave it overnight and it's on a slow charger on a wired charger or your uh, Qi charging pad and you know in the morning it's done.

No worries. There's basically no usage scenario for this thing. This is why even if it works, it's just kind of completely failed. There is no point to this product.

It's ethically bad. the cost, the size, the safety, and the legalities of thing even, and then get that working. But it's how you physically use your phone. Only under certain circumstances will it actually work.

Reminds me of the U-beam demos where they're you know, holding the phone like this and it's got the big tracking target look. It works. Oh yeah, we're facing the transmitter like this. This whole thing.

Why? Why does this exist? I? I don't know. it's just no. So yes, you are right to be skeptical about this thing. because it's it's.

Just don't be surprised if it even makes it to market. It's just like you can't actually buy it. It's just marketing Wankery 101. So the Xiaomi Me: air charging.

It's going to fail. Guaranteed. Like, don't even worry about this. just throw it away.

With all the existing, uh, wireless charging technologies for mobile phones, it's just not pointless. It's never going to be a thing. so I hope you like that if you found it useful. And if you did, please give it a big thumbs up.

As always, discuss down below or over in the Eev blog forum where there's a dedicated thread for each video and check out my alternative platforms as well. I'm not just on the Youtubes and let us know in the comments down below. If you want uh, Sharia and myself to actually get on a skypey Zoom core, whatever the kitties are using these days and talk about, do just have a discussion on this sort of 5g technology. Let us know.

Catch you next time.