Mobile phones: A completely wireless experience

A few months ago my old phones usb port broke leading me to repair it and give it to my brother whilst getting a nexus 5. The nexus 5 has the same micro usb port that my old phone had and that broke so easily, it seams the cause of this is the very fine ribbon contacts on the phones port wearing away over time. The simple solution to this problem is to just go completely wireless.

In order to go wireless I had to consider what I used the wire for and how I could replace it. Mainly I used it for charging, this could easily be replaced by a wireless charging pad which uses induction to pass current in to a coil near the battery. This doesn't seem like such a large advantage besides the usb port not getting used, but it is amazing bordering on revolutionary. That was a bit of an overstatement and I'm sure most people would think of plugging in a phone as no trouble at all, however, the convenience of just putting the phone down and that's it is one of those things you have to use to understand. When I get home I can just put it on the pad, when I go to bed, checking my phone at night, all of these tasks benefit greatly from not having to deal with a wire.

The second thing I used the wire for was data transfer. I have a decent internet connection so its no problem to use software like Dropbox, however this proved to be a bit fiddly as I didn't want to use the Dropbox app and the website requires a login and has a bit of a clunky GUI. I found a nice internet independent solution with filezilla. Using a SSH server app on my phone meant I could connect to it using filezilla and sftp. This had a few benefits such as no intermediary step for copying files, also as long as I'm on the same wi-fi network it doesn't matter where I am so I can copy files across whilst doing something else with my phone in a different room. Unfortunately there is one drawback, in certain situations such as when on holiday or in university accommodation the wi-fi is configured in such a way that the LAN is on a completely different network and phone to computer communication is impossible, however there is little that my phone can't download that my computer can and so this issue is minor at most.

Overall it has been an enjoyable experience and I can easily see wireless charging becoming a big thing in the near future. Wireless file transfer is also a really nice technology to use however, it could do with some purpose built software with a server somewhere to initiate a handshake between the two devices so you wouldn't have to mess about with the IP addresses.

Completely wireless phones? I would completely recommend doing this for the convenience and the experience with filezilla and sftp.