iPhone 4S, Meet The Palm Touchstone Inductive Charger

Posted on October 17, 2011 by Roger

It’s obviously very early on and very cumbersome, but I have successfully got my new iPhone 4S to charge from my old Palm Pre’s Touchstone inductive charger. I may not be using WebOS anymore (sadly), but the spirit of my Pre lives on. My goal is to bundle this up in a nice package that can be easily added to an iPhone 4 or 4S, and look good doing it. I’ll post updates when I’m closer to that goal.

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  • http://twitter.com/jakerome Jake Rome

    keep us up to date!

  • Dan

    Do want!
    I’m still using my Pre2 but have no choice to leave it.I’m fairly skilled at hackery, I see you’ve got a couple resistors there… care to share?
    Also any presence detect on apples proprietary dock connector?

  • Anonymous

    Dan, I’m pretty sure if you look at the breadboard you’ll see that the two data lines are actually shorted together since that’s the path of least resistance, therefore the resistors aren’t doing anything. They would be doing something though if each data line was independent of each other.

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  • BillWiTheScienceFi

    I’m tackling this project this weekend. Bought a silicone case with no hole in the bottom for charging. Cutting up a 30 pin mail side charger cord and soldering it to the induction coil. Let me know if you encountered any problems trying this out.

  • Refro

    Man I’d to put my old Touchstone to use, if you can figure this out and get a compatible  case produced count me in.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=785105476 Casey Gilson

    So, is it necessary to short the data lines? the iphone charges when plugged into a computer and the data lines are used. Have you gotten any farther on this design?

  • http://twitter.com/rudra_banerji Rudra Banerji

    Have any success lately?  I just found my old touchstone *sniff* – I’m sure it could use something to do :)

  • Joseph Cortez

    Any updates on this? I have a 3rd party back plate on my iphone 4. Replaced the glass. I would like to get my touchstone working with the iphone.

  • http://www.OkGoDoIt.com OkGoDoIt

    Wow, somehow my post is on the first page of Google results for “iphone inductive charger”! Apparently there are a lot of people that really wish the iPhone had the great simple charging solution pioneered by Palm with the Pre and Pixi.

    I was excited to post this early work to get my new iPhone 4s charging from my Touchstone, but honestly I don’t have much in the way of electric/circuits experience.  Most of my tech expertise is in software, far abstracted from the underlying electronic plumbing.  And I realized not long after posting this that even if I were to learn the necessarily skills, it would at best result in a clunky hacked solution, not anywhere near the elegant integrated solution of the Palm phones.

    Regardless, after more than half a year with my iPhone, I’m really not enjoying it much.  It certainly is great in some ways, but in other ways it falls so short as to be nearly unusable.  Android and Windows Phone also have their share of pros and cons, and no current platform is anywhere near perfect.  That being said, for my needs, I’m probably going to switch back to Android soon.  I’m mainly waiting to see if Google will give me another one for free at this year’s Google I/O, or if I should go back to my old Evo 4G.

    If the iPhone was the perfect phone like the Pre used to be, and iOS was the perfect platform like WebOS used to be, I’d definitely keep working on this project to make it even better.  But really I don’t see the point.  The iPhone isn’t worth this much time and effort on my part, sadly.

    For those who would like to continue trying to get the iPhone to charge inductively, this webpage was a great resource for me at the time: http://www.ladyada.net/make/mintyboost/icharge.html

    If anyone has any cool implementations to share, let me know, and I’d be happy to post them here.  Perhaps I can use my Google ranking to help others find a good solution :-)

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