Yesterday Apple announced the new iPhone 8 and iPhone X. Both these new handsets will support Wireless Charging.

You can find Qi Wireless Charging devices on Amazon, starting usually from £16.

Wireless charging in itself is not new technology and a few other manufacturers have been trying to get it into the mainstream for years.

In an unlikely move for Apple their new phones support an open interface standard called Qi charging.

Before you ask it’s pronounced ‘CHEE’ and comes from the Chinese word for Energy Flow.

Qi charging is a standard set by the WPC, the wireless power consortium.

They have been established since 2008 and is now on version 1.2.2 of the standard.

It works in a similar principle to ZigBee – meaning all tech that uses it will in theory work with each other. This means you will be able to use any Qi device or pad to charge your new iPhone 8 or iPhone X. However Apple do plan to also have their own version of Qi with ‘expanded specification’ they they call ‘AirPower’.

One company that must have seen this coming is IKEA.

In 2015 they released a range of Qi Wireless charging furniture and lamps. Allowing you to buy cheap, integrated wireless charging solutions.

This is the second time they have been spot on with their tech integrations, they also released a range of Smart Bulbs that work on ZigBee. The same standard as Philips Hue.

Other mainstream adopters of Qi are McDonalds, they also started rolling out Qi charging points in their restaurants in 2015.

Apple fans everywhere will rejoice that no longer are they forced to buy expensive certified cables, that often break.

We are pretty excited by this move by Apple as it’s yet another move by a big player into a shared smart ecosystem. Moving away from walled gardens and closed tech!

What do you think of Qi Wireless Charging? Let us know in the comments.

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Apple is expanding strongly into smart home space – you probably already have an Ipad or a Macbook, maybe even Apple TV. Now Apple wants to improve and ‘smarten up’ your inhome experience with their HomeKit range and to increase sales, they’ve started new instore displays.

This is happening wordwide, In the U.S., people can check out the experience at Apple’s Union Square store in San Francisco, we’ve no data yet on which UK store offers this new display – if you know this, please get in touch!

Credit: Techcrunch
Photo credit: Peter Parks/AFP/Getty Images

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One area for growth in the Smart Home space at the moment is connected buttons or controllers.

Tech companies are starting to realise users don’t always want to open an app on their phone to activate their favourite light setting or play music.

Following on this path hardware pro Logitech has relaunched their programmable button Pop.

The big difference to the first version of the product they released last year is this time it’s fully compatible with Apple Home, allowing a press of Pop to activate an Apple Home theme or trigger something set in the app.

The Logitech Pop, as before, works with Logitech’s Pop App – uses a hub to connect to the internet and connection between Pop and the hub is done via Bluetooth. Many Pop’s can connect one one hub.

Prices start from £119.99, thanks to David our reader for updating us on the full price point. Additional buttons can be purchased for £30. Pop comes in four colours; white, alloy, coral, and teal.

They are due to ship later this year!

The post Logitech announces Pop v2 with Apple Home support! appeared first on Smart Home Geeks.

Apple has given the Apple Home section of their website a spring clean, making it now fit with the rest of their website. This is great to see as it normally means something exciting is coming, as well as a focus for the company.

The update also now features a 45 second video that showcase the solution as well as its common uses.

See the improved website and watch the video here: http://www.apple.com/ios/home/

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