Mod gives Galaxy S Plus smartphone wireless charging

ONE WAY to make use of HP's Touchstone Dock is to modify your smartphone to be compatible with it.

This is exactly what Qian Qin, a computer engineering student has done to his Samsung Galaxy Plus. Disapointed with the fact the handset has its USB port on the top, he modified it to work with HP's Touchstone dock.

To enable the Samsung smartphone to dock and charge inductively with the Touchstone dock, Qin took the rear cover off a Pre 3 for around £10 and removed the inductive circuit. He then installed this into the back of the Galazy S Plus so it would work with the dock wirelessly.

Qin said, "The tricky stuff is modifying to the micro USB plug. To be exact, to cut it really short so it doesn't stand out. This requires some skill and a lot of patience. As the plug is really small, you definitely don't want two wires coming from it."

He explains that two wires would require small solder points, which would break within a few days of use, so the answer is to only wire to the +5V and send the other wire elsewhere. In this case Qin wired it to the SD card slot.

Once the modification is complete the phone will charge wirelessly with the Touchstone dock. In landscape mode the phone switches to the multimedia dock application and in portrait mode the phone still charges, of course.

In theory you can add this modification to any phone or maybe even a tablet. The best thing about this mod is that it doesn't make the phone any fatter, the rear cover still clips on as normal and in total the cost of adding the cool feature is only about £40. µ