Here is a piece of breaking news (or breaking rumour) to start your Wednesday: according to a piece of code unearthed by Redditor basmith7  and reported by OMG Chrome, Google has at least one experimental Chrome OS board with Wireless Charging.

Here is the commit log that we are discussing today:

ryu: enable inductive charging

Enable inductive charging on Ryu.

BUG=chrome-os-partner:31392
TEST=Sanity check only. Build and boot on Ryu.
BRANCH=None

Now, not all the Chrome OS boards become actual Chromebooks or Chromeboxes (or anything else running Chrome OS, if they are planning some) Hence, we cannot be super excited about getting our hands on a Chromebook with wireless charging yet.

Wireless charging is slowly gaining some interest from OEMs. The major OEMs who are interested in this technology already have their Chromebooks (Dell and Lenovo) and their partner Intel is really interested in Chrome OS. This gives me a certain level of hope  that we will see this on one of the Chromebooks in 2015. This is just a guesstimate though!

Other Details

The board Ryu  has a lid, a light bar, a Tegra chipset, reversible USB-C support and a regular AC/External power supply according to the code.

The lightbar suggests to me that whoever is building this device is working closely with Google on the design. We saw this lightbar only on Google’s own Pixel and HP Chromebook 11 version one designed “with Google”

Another interesting piece that I noticed in the code is this:

* Determine recovery mode is requested by the power, volup, and
* voldown buttons being pressed.

That’s the method that we all use on Android phones and tablets to go to recovery mode. Does this mean Ryu is something more than your regular Chromebook or Chromebox?

Interesting!