By Wireless charging is a convenience for sure. No one likes fiddling with loose wires in the dark to plug in before bed. But it's also a minor one, and so long as phones continue coming with wired chargers, you might not see much need to make the switch. If you're looking for excuses though, Google's new Pixel Stand might be able to win you over with a handful of tricks that make it a little bit more than just a minor convenience.
Google's new Pixel Stand is, first and foremost, a wireless charger and a good one at that. It can charge a Pixel 3 at 10 watts, double the speed of a Qi wireless charger's typical 5 watt limit which the Stand will have to abide by if you use it to charge other devices. That top speed still comes up short compared to the Pixel 3's pack-in 18-watt wired charger which is still king for fast fill-ups, but if you're charging overnight on the bed stand or all day at your desk, you'll hardly notice the difference.
But the real draw behind the Pixel Stand are the quality-of-life improvements it can offer on top of charging. Unlike other wireless chargers, the Pixel Stand is smart and can identify and recognise your specific Pixel 3 phone through an invisible handshake encoded in the very rhythm of the wireless charging patterns. This lets the Stand fire up features on your phone the second you set it down.
For instance, you can configure your Pixel so that whenever it's on your bedside Stand, Do Not Disturb mode automatically engages. It's a much more flexible and fluid way to block out notifications while you're sleeping compared to setting a rigid time-based schedule for the feature to turn on whether you're actually hitting the hay or not. The Pixel Stand also enables the "Sunrise alarm," which slowly lights up your phone's screen with a warm glow in the 15 minutes before your morning alarm goes off, subtly lighting up your room so that your alarm doesn't rouse you into horrible morning darkness.
Not all of the Pixel Stand's features revolve around sleep though. It can also act as a smart picture frame for all the photos you have tucked away in Google Photos. After you configure the settings to tell a specific Stand which photos and albums it's allowed to display (no embarrassing photos from college allowed at the office might be a wise choice), your charging Pixel will cycle through your archive, with the selections cropped and zoomed by machine learning to best fit a portrait display.
Since every Pixel Stand and Pixel 3 can identify each other, you can customise different Stands to tell your phone to display different albums, and every Pixel 3 smartphone can have different settings that it runs when it recognises a certain Stand, so you and your partner can share the same charge, but have your separate phones react to it completely differently.
With all those features packed in the device, Pixel Stand is much more than just a wireless charger, but those added features will come at a price, though. The Pixel Stand comes in at £69 compared to the Pixel 3's included wired charger which is, of course, free.
