Cars are becoming increasingly high-tech with all sorts of gadgetry all over the place. The Mopar division at Chrysler is introducing an industry first this summer by adding an in-vehicle wireless charging system.

The idea is going to be a familiar one to most readers of Mobile Magazine. There’s a special case for your phone, an inductive charging mat, and no need for a wire to connect the two. This is much the same kind of technology that we see with products like the PowerMat, except this one will be installed directly in the center console of your car.

As a $200 option, the wireless charging system will be first offered this summer in the 2013 Dodge Dart. I imagine they’ll eventually roll out the option to other Chrysler vehicles too. I certainly hope that the mat has been designed with some special non-slip material, because I’d hate to see phones flying all over the place when you take a hard turn, accelerate quickly, or brake suddenly.

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German automakers have obviously decided that the time has come to inductively power bigger gadgets than toothbrushes. It’s the electric vehicle’s turn now. German government-backed “Effizienzhaus-Plus mit Elektromobilität” project, or “Effective House Plus with Electric Mobility” has pilot plans to demo a feasibility and effectiveness of these inductive chargers for a speciment of a German household (and a garage for several electric vehicles):

EV’s in that test will include electric bikes and Smart ForTwo cars, plus several more electric cars from makers such as Audi, BMW, Daimler, Opel and Volkswagen. Daimler will start its entry into such tests in March 2012 by supplying a Mercedes-Benz A-Class E-CELL modified to include an induction charging option to test how effective the technology proves in real-world conditions. Fitted with a special charging coil, the A-Class E-CELL only needs to be positioned over a charging coil in the ground to automatically begin cable-free charging by way of an electromagnetic field.

Of course, a mid-sized or bigger electric car like that Tesla might be better and more “effectively” served by connecting a charging cable directly to it, as opposed to to running inductive coils in the garage floor and walls. We are supposed to run an “Effizienzhaus” effectively, aren’t we? Why waste that precious power on heating up the gap between coils in your garage floor and in car?

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Ugh, wires. They can get so messy and tangled, completely taking away from the otherwise clean experience you get with iProducts. Well, you can at least ditch the charging cable, because the iPort LaunchPort inductive charger for the iPad 2 has been announced and it’s looking simplistically sweet.

Like other inductive charging solutions, you don’t need a physical cable to connect to your iPad in order to top up its battery. Instead, you simply place it on the charging base and it will magnetically align, juicing up that battery with no wires attached. The iPort LaunchPort system consists of three parts.

The first is the PowerShuttle hard case for the iPad. You’ll need this to replace whatever other case you may already be using, but it might be able to fit over an InvisibleShield. The case has a somewhat unsightly circular bump on the back, but that’s the part that magnetically attaches to the BaseStation tabletop mounting and charging dock, as well as the WallStation wall-mounting and charging dock.

This looks pretty convenient, especially the wall mount idea. Peep the intro video below and then hang tight until Q4 for the iPort LaunchPort to hit store shelves.

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Everyone and their grandmother (almost literally) is sitting on pins and needles waiting for Steve Jobs to cross the stage yet once again to reveal how he’s changing smartphones all over again with the iPhone 5. The latest rumors point toward a September launch, so until then, we have conjecture and hearsay. We also have the latest mockup of the iPhone 5, based on the most recent and most accurate information available.

Note that this is indeed a mockup and not the real device, since none have been left behind at a random bar (at least not yet). The most prominent change is the move away from the flat edges of the iPhone 4 and toward more of an iPod touch style roundness. It’ll also reportedly have more of a “teardrop” profile, not unlike the MacBook Air, tapering from fat at the top to thin at the bottom.

Some early rumors pointed toward a stretch to a four-inch screen, but now a 3.7-inch Retina Display is starting to sound more likely. This will have the same resolution as the iPhone 4, but will get much closer to an edge-to-edge display with virtually no bezel. Further still, the earpiece and sensors might be behind the screen too, though we’re not sure how well that’d work.

Despite other rumors that the home button was being abandoned, it seems that an expanded home button could be in the works. This will provide a gesture area that is not unlike the Palm Pre 2 (except Steve will say it’s completely different and then sue HP/Palm over it later). Similarly, an inductive charger might be in the works, again not unlike the TouchStone on the HP/Palm phones.

And it’s gonna be a world phone, meaning it could utilize the Qualcomm Gobi chipset for some dual GSM/CDMA action. That could be good for Verizon.

What do you think? I like the near bezel-free design and I don’t mind the teardrop idea. I just hope that it really does bring something new to the table aside from a new shape.

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How can you rectify this situation? Well, let’s turn our attention over to jvalal of Instructables for a more contemporary take. He took the all-black power mat induction charger and modified it to fit inside a wooden board. It may look like a cutting board for your vegetables, but it’s just as functional as the regular power mat.

It’s not like it was the easiest of processes, of course. Jvalal removed the “electronic guts” from the power mat charger and then manually mounted them on the underside of a gutted out piece of wood. But that wasn’t the hardest part.

The hardest part was making the wood surface thin enough that devices placed on top would get a positive lock on the charging coils below. Cut it too thin and you’d poke a hole in the wood instead, effectively nullifying its clean appearance.

Watch the video below and then hit up the original post for step-by-step directions.

Source: Lifehacker

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