Something I don't understand about induction charging: why is it even necessary if the device and charger are still expected to be in flat contact with one another (with at most a few millimeters of separation)?<p>Is the point just for arbitrary positionability on a flat charging surface?<p>If so, I feel like there are simpler ways to solve that, just with clever solid-state connector design.<p>Imagine a BGA processor that could be arbitrarily aligned into a BGA socket (not only rotated, but placed anywhere onto a BGA array <i>larger</i> than the CPU), and would continue working. That's possible, no? It doesn't exist, but it's possible. You could have the motherboard look for known <i>sense pins</i> on the processor by putting its own BGA pins into a sense mode; and then, having found which pins the processor is aligned to, it could "hook up" the rest of the pins appropriately. Any pins the CPU isn't touching would remain powered down or in a low-voltage sense mode, where they're safe to touch.<p>Well, if you can imagine that, then just reduce the number of pads on the device side from hundreds to two, while keeping all the pads on the socket side. But lose the "socket" part.<p>Imagine a charger that's just a big flat matrix of tiny copper pads, where each copper pad is actually four quadrants: two for sense, one for power, one for ground. The power and ground are normally powered down.<p>If you have a device (a phone, say) with two large flat charging pads on the back, and you lay it onto the BGA matrix—then the phone's pads will activate (a number of!) the charger's sense pads; the charger will have an "image" of which pins to power, and discretize that image into two clusters (like discretizing touch-points on a digitizer); and then one cluster of activated sense-pins will have their sibling power pins activated; and the other cluster will have their sibling ground pins activated.<p>Other than the copper being exposed to the elements, I don't see why this isn't workable.<p>(And before you say "my phone is in a case"—your case would just need a pair of pass-through conductor pads.)