News

Huawei Wants To Make Long-Range Wireless Charging A Reality

Published

5 years ago

March 30, 2021

huawei wants to make long-range wireless charging a reality

Short battery life consistently ranks as the top complaint of smartphone users. To increase it, smartphone manufacturers can produce devices with larger batteries, increasing their size and weight, improve the energy density of their batteries, or use different battery technology. Alternatively, they can make it easier for users to charge their devices, and that’s the path Huawei has decided to take by making long-range wireless charging a reality, according to an IT Home report.

The report revealed that the Chinese multinational technology company known for its telecommunications equipment and consumer electronics has filed a patent for a new technology that would make it possible to charge battery-powered devices wirelessly over a long distance.

Currently, wireless charging requires two coils to be placed directly opposite each other. This greatly restricts the potential applications of this otherwise wonderful technology, whose only other major drawback is its inefficiency.

huawei long-range wireless charging patent

IT Home

According to the patent’s description, Huawei has been able to figure out how to increase the distance between the two coils by sending electricity through a variety of media, including iron, aluminum, copper, alloy materials, metal pipes, humans, animals, soil, earth, seawater, or just about any other material with conductivity greater than that of air.

“IT Home understands that the purpose of this Huawei patent is to increase the equivalent coupling capacitance between the transmitting electrode and the receiving electrode, which can effectively increase the transmission power between the transmitting device and the receiving device, thereby realizing long-distance wireless charging,” writes the technology portal.

Also Read: Apple Likely To Release 8K VR Headset In 2022

This kind of long-range wireless charging technology could revolutionize the wearables market, but its potential applications extend much further. For example, it could be used to charge embedded medial devices, industrial sensors, and other small devices that can’t be easily connected to a regular charger.

Since the patented technology has yet to be put to practical use, we don’t know anything at all about its safety or potential downsides.

News

Instagram Now Lets You Tune Its Algorithm, But There’s One Big Catch

The new controls promise users “agency” over their feed, but asking to see more from accounts you actually follow returns an error.

Published

3 days ago

June 11, 2026

Nour Nasir

Instagram

Instagram has expanded its algorithm personalization feature to the main feed, letting users specify which topics they want surfaced more or less often in recommendations.

Instagram chief Adam Mosseri framed the change as a matter of user control. “I believe it’s in our best interest as a business to empower people to shape Instagram into something that works for them, and that people should be able to have a meaningful amount of agency over the products they spend so much time in,” he wrote on Threads.

Though it turns out that agency has limits. The controls only accept interest-based topics, such as “rescue dogs” or “parenting humor”. Requesting “posts from people I follow” returns no results, which is obviously a sore point for creators whose posts rarely reach their own audiences. Mosseri conceded the tension: “Who you follow used to be a meaningful tool people had for shaping their own experience, and as recommendations took over the main feed that tool quietly stopped working”.

Also Read: How To Find & Cancel Pending Instagram Requests

Instagram credits large language models for making its algorithms legible enough to personalize, and says it is “actively working on supporting requests for people, different moods or vibes, content types, and more” – potentially leading to a fully “bespoke” version of the app.