One of the products being shown a CES is a dongle intended to let you charge a tablet from a laptop USB port that normally wouldn't work because it didn't provide enough power.
The CNET writeup implies that it's actually boosting the power output from the port beyond the normally available amount. This seems improbable to me because the ports should have current protection to protect themselves from shorts. Also, if it was possible to bypass the current limit externally, I'd've expected at least some tablet vendors to have included the ability to do so directly in their cables.
One possibility that occurs to me is that the dongle is just spoofing responses to the tablet when it queries the laptop about the maximum power it can deliver while only providing a trickle charge that the tablet would otherwise reject as too slow to bother with.
No comments:
Post a Comment