The new Splashpad is designed to allow users to recharge all of their portable electronics in just one place

• Finding the right battery charger for your cellphone, digital camera, camcorder or PDA among the sea of anonymous black boxes that clutter our homes is a complete pain - as is finding a free socket when they all need charging at the same time.
• Instead of each device needing its own charger, it may soon be possible to recharge phones and cameras by placing them on a plastic pad the size of a mouse mat.
• A dense array of coils buried in the pad will transmit energy to the gadget to charge its batteries.
• And it will be possible to charge as many gadgets as can fit on the pad at once, the inventors say.
• Splashpower, a spin-off company from the University of Cambridge, UK, has been promising to launch its SplashPad charger for the past three years.
• These gadgets contain a coil that sucks power from a companion coil housed in a separate unit and connected to the mains.
• While checking one of Splashpower's applications, the UK Patent Office found an electronics enthusiast's website that describes a wireless charger in which an electrical device (a wireless mouse) can be recharged by placing it in a precisely defined location on a mouse mat.
• The Splashpad is different, as the devices being charged can be placed anywhere on the pad, and several can be charged at the same time.
• It has also dealt with the problem of ensuring that the magnetic fields it generates are low enough not to erase any nearby credit cards or video tapes.
• Inside the pad, an array of coils spread a low-power magnetic field low and wide over the pad's flat surface so that devices anywhere on the surface can intercept charging flux (see graphic).