Accessory maker Nomad  has a long history of delivering great accessories for iOS and Android devices, using great quality materials and craftsmanship. Now, the company is partnering with wireless charging technology startup Aira to debut the latter’s premiere product: FreePower, a position-free wireless charging technology. Nomad’s new Base Station Pro ($229) is the first product on the market with Aira’s FreePower tech, and I got the chance to check it out for the past week to see how it measures up.

The basics

Nomad’s Base Station Pro is a wireless charging pad that can charge up to three devices simultaneously. It works with all Qi-capable devices, which includes the latest iPhone models and most of the latest Android phones, as well as numerous accessories, including AirPods Pro and other headphones. In many ways, it’s very similar to what Apple was promising with the AirPower multi-device charger it debuted and then subsequently canceled — but it doesn’t work with the Apple Watch, because that uses Apple’s own proprietary wireless charging tech.

The Nomad Base Station Pro is just under 9 inches long, and about 5.5 inches wide. It’s less than half-an-inch thick, which is especially impressive, given that it has so much charging flexibility hidden within (there are 18 coils inside). As mentioned, it can support charging up to three devices simultaneously, and has an LED indicator on the side with three lights to let you know how many devices are actively drawing charge at any time. Nomad includes one USB-C to USB-C cable in the box, along with a 30w USB-C PD power adapter to connect it.

There are plenty of multi-device wireless chargers out there (Nomad even makes a few) but the real advantage that Aira’s FreePower tech brings to the table is the freedom to place devices on the pad in virtually any orientation and have them automatically charge. Most Qi chargers require you to place devices within a very specific range of area relative to the coil or coils contained within the charger — and being off by even a bit can either cause a device not to charge, or make the charging process much less efficient.

Design and performance

The Nomad Base Station Pro is larger than most wireless chargers out there, but all that surface area is usable space. And Nomad’s signature dark metal and leather finishes are both attractive and practical here. With its single-cable design, this is a much less cluttered and more physically attractive solution to charging than a mess of cables and a multi-USB adapter, for instance.

Inside, Aira’s technology is the beating heart of the Nomad Base Station Pro. There are 18 overlapping coils contained with the charger, along with a layer of controllers on a circuit board that provide the smarts that make its position-free placement charging possible. Basically, Aira’s technology automatically detects what kind of charge any device placed on the pad can accept, and then directs the necessary juice its way, while also optimizing the magnetic field between the device’s built-in charging coil and the coil array found within the Base Station Pro for optimal power delivery. 

In testing, it worked just as advertised, detecting my iPhone XS Pro Max no matter what orientation or where I lay it on the pad (provided the phone’s own coil was fully on the pad, of course). Ditto when I added a second iPhone, as well as AirPods Pro, and another set of wireless earbuds I have that feature a Qi-enabled charging case. You can even slide the iPhone along the surface of the pad and it will continue to charge, without losing the connection as the field tracks the device.

What’s ironic about this is that even though it feels like magic, it’s really what I had always imagined wireless charging would be like before I’d actually used any wireless charging devices. Current standard Qi-based charging is much more like having a slightly more convenient but still essentially fixed dock, whereas Aira’s FreePower tech truly allows you to toss down your device and have it charge reliably.

Bottom line

There are some caveats to keep in mind with this tech: First, it’s not officially Qi-certified — but that’s only because there’s no current existing standard for free position, according to the company. They’ve done extensive testing to confirm that it adheres to Qi standards for compatibility, heat management and more, and Aira is working with the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC) that owns and manages the Qi standard to create a standard that covers free-position charging.

In testing, it works well, and charges Qi-enabled devices reliably, with the added convenience of allowing you to place them anywhere on the pad. That may not seem like a huge deal, but it vastly improves the experience. Add three-device support to that, and Nomad’s Base Station Pro quickly becomes a unique (if somewhat expensive) wireless charger that’s hard to beat.

Aira, meanwhile, has big plans for FreePower, which includes providing the tech to a number of partners across consumer and commercial markets. It’s easy to imagine how well this could work in situations like coffee shop counters that are fully wireless charging surfaces, for instance, or in cars with charging center consoles. The company has big plans, but if this debut is any indication, those should pay off with big advantages across daily life for consumers.

WHEN YOU STREAM the latest Netflix show, you fire up servers on Amazon Web Services, most of which run on Linux. When an F-16 fighter takes off, three Kubernetes clusters run to keep the jet’s software running. When you visit a website, any website, chances are it’s run on Node.js. These foundational technologies—Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js—and many others that silently permeate our lives have one thing in common: open source.

Open source is a technology development and distribution methodology, where the codebase and all development—from setting a roadmap to building new features, fixing bugs, and writing documentation—is done in public. A governing body (a group of hobbyists, a company, or a foundation) publicly manages this work, which is most often done in a public repository on either GitHub or GitLab. Open source has two important, and somewhat counterintuitive, advantages: speed and security.

These practices lead to faster technological developments, because a built-in global community of developers helps them mature, especially if the technology is solving a real problem. Top engineers also prefer to work with and on open source projects. Wrongly cast as secretive automatons, they are more often like artists, who prefer to learn, work, collaborate, and showcase what they’ve built in public, even when they are barely compensated for that work.

 
But doesn’t keeping a technology’s codebase open make it more vulnerable to attack? In fact, exposing the codebase publicly for security experts and hackers to easily access and test is the best way to keep the technology secure and build trust with end users for the long haul. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and open source is that sunlight in technology. Linux, the operating system, and Kubernetes, the cloud container orchestration system, are two of the most prominent examples.

Open source is not limited to software, but also impacts hardware development. RISC-V, first introduced in 2010 at UC Berkeley, is an open source chip design instruction set architecture—which tells a chip how to do basic computation, like addition, subtraction, multiplication, etc. RISC-V is gaining traction in the hardware manufacturing space throughout the world, because it lowers barriers to entry and increases chip development speed. OpenRAN, an open source 5G networking stack that started gaining momentum in 2016, is also gaining more attention and has already been embraced by the UK and Japanese governments.

 
Using open source technology is now the fastest way new products get built and legacy technologies get replaced. Yet as US policymakers develop their industrial policy to compete with China, open source is conspicuously absent.

 
 
By leaning on the advantages of open source, policymakers can pursue an industrial policy to help the US compete in the 21st century in line with our broader values. The alternative is to continue a top-down process that picks winners and losers based on not just technology but also political influence, which only helps individual firms secure market share, not sparking innovation more broadly. A few billion more dollars won’t save Intel from its technical woes, but a healthier ecosystem leveraging open source technology and community would put the US in a better position for the future.

Open source technology allows for vendor-neutrality. Whether you’re a country or a company, if you use open source, you’re not locked in to another company’s technical stack, road map, or licensing agreements. After Linux was first created in 1991, it was widely adopted by large companies like Dell and IBM as a vendor-neutral alternative to Microsoft’s Windows operating system. In the future, chip designers won’t be locked into Intel or ARM with RISC-V. With OpenRAN, 5G network builders won’t be forced to buy from Huawei, Nokia, or Ericsson.

However, open source is not the panacea to all problems. By definition, anyone can run, change, copy, and distribute an open source technology. Thus, the technology and knowledge transfer can go to friends or foes. Indeed, China’s technology sector is starting to embrace open source—a sensible thing to do for a country looking to maintain its rapid growth and establish technological self-reliance in the face of US sanctions.

This should not scare American policymakers, because the core values of open source—transparency, openness, and collaboration—play to America’s strengths. The Department of Defense is one of the largest consumers of open source technologies and is well versed in the intricacies and nuances. A few federal agencies have also open-sourced their code, as part of the Federal Source Code policy instituted during the waning days of the Obama administration in 2016. Among other things, this policy requires all federal agencies to open-source 20 percent of their custom-made codebase. Today, anyone can find and use the code open-sourced from these departments on code.gov. Both the policy and the code repositories are managed publicly and transparently—as all good open source projects should be.