Would Wireless Charging Get You Through The Door At Maccas?

Free Wi-Fi is already a feature of each McDonald’s “Restaurant” in Australia. In Europe, the burger giant is trialling free phone charging. Would that be enough to get you through the door?

PhoneArena reports that selected Maccas in Europe are using wireless charging stations built into tables to tempt customers into a tasty burger and fries meal. The wireless charging stations are Qi based if you’ve got a phone that supports that standard. The most obvious local Qi-compatible candidate would be Nokia’s Lumia 920.

What if you’re hankering for a slice of sweet heart attack meat but your phone doesn’t support Qi charging? The tables apparently have an inbuilt facility to use a plug-in solution from PowerKiss. This entails a tiny ring that plugs into the charging port of your phone and then handles the Qi charging from there.

It’s a European trial only for the time being, but as with all things Maccas, once a concept takes hold it’s often rolled out worldwide quite quickly. I can see a few issues with wireless charging, as staff are unlikely to know anything about it if something doesn’t work, and it’s not clear how they plan to stop the PowerKiss adaptors from walking out of the store, but it’s an interesting concept. I’m also obliged to point out that, free power or not, it’s not wise to only eat fast food all the time.

Euro McDonald’s testing wireless charging for customers [PhoneArena]


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