http://www.droid-life.com/2012/03/20/samsung-galaxy-siii-to-allow-for-wireless-charging-up-to-2-meters-away/

Would you be interested in wireless charging of your Galaxy SIII? No, we aren’t just talking about the Qi or inductive charging that you are seeing in the picture above, we are talking about having a charging module of sorts on your desk and you being able to set your phone anywhere within 2 meters of it while still filling up the tank. Rumor has it that Samsung has created their own tech that will allow exactly that to happen and may have include it inside the next-gen Galaxy phone.  

Here is a brief demo of similar technology from a company called Fulton:

I don’t know about you, but wireless charging is something that should have been built into phones long ago. I understand that companies need to make money and that selling a separate Qi back to a phone is the way to do it, but it’s 2012, meaning this should have become standard already. Days of searching your desk or kitchen or bedroom for a cord should have been out the door long ago.

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This is awesome and another first for mobile devices thanks to  Android's flexibility and use of many OEM hardware manufacturers. I would very much like this in a universal type of approach where any device can just be placed in vacinity of the charging station and they all recharge. So you're at home in the living room and everyone's phones, tablets, game consoles, etc all charge while in pockets on table and so forth.

Taking this a step further and progress the tech some... imagine cars at stop lights being recharged or in countries with heavy use of round-abouts... charging stations in the centers of those.

Basically wireless charging like this will become common place and pretty awesome. Only issue I see is the potential for lost energy as it is not picked up by a device needing to be charged and just deposits into space. It would require some type of item in the rechargeable device to force a more direct current transfer. Hopefully, that's something built into this device.

You know most devices use microUSB to charge and you can get replacements for only a few dollars on Ebay or Amazon right? :)

What phone do you have?

KINDLE FIRE $4

EDIT: Now I'm not arguing against he awesomeness of this tech. Having a universal wireless charging would be amazing.

On TED, there's a video of a company who have built a system where the charging units are put into the walls, and can power everything between the walls.

Pretty cool.
One thing... what will this do to current batteries? I don't have a fancy smart phone so my phone battery lasts about 10 days instead of 10 hours... but surely in both cases the best thing for overall battery life is still to let it run down before you charge it (admittedly battery tech is much better now but it's still a good idea to do it for those of us who don't like throwing away a perfectly good phone every year). As such, having something like this at your desk at work for example you would still be better turning it off so your phone doesn't get automatically charged when you don't need it. Or at home would you have to avoid the spot around the charger so your phone doesn't connect for a 5 second charge when you walk by?

That's pretty cool.

My reservation is still with lost energy. i.e. if its running 100% of the time, I will have a huge bill and wasted energy. Now if it only runs when a rechargeable device is detected, then that's all good.

You don't have to worry about that with Lithium ion. It doesn't have the memory affect.

Unless you're phone is ancient, you can also not worry about it.

I've owned phones for years and never had to replace a battery.

Same with portable game devices and PS3 controllers.

Cool, but what about the electro-magnetic fields this produces ? I'm not buying into the hysteria around so called e-smog, but I suppose too much of it might be ... too much.

Last time I read about this a few years back it was pretty much agreed that it would cause no issues with living things.

Similar idea as Telsa originally hand to some extent actually.

I think it would have to be pretty significant to cause issues, well beyond what they are talking about here.

Hmm, seems you are right... I thought that was what had screwed my laptop battery up (at only 2 years old I would be lucky to get 30 minutes of non-plugged in time, compared to 4 hours new... whereas now at 3.5 years old I owuld have to turn wireless off and the screen to lowest brightness just to get 10 minutes) turns out it was probably the opposite problem... most of the time using it was spent plugged in, which is apprently not good for Li-ion (you would think laptop manufacturers could figure out an intelligent solution to that, ie have the laptop use some battery charge and stop it charging occasionally)