For some reason, the SplashPad never caught on (or maybe the product couldn't work as advertised?). So it looked like the prospect of charging our smartphones and PDAs without wires was bleak.

That's why a recent demonstration by an MIT team is news to me. They were able to power a 60 watt bulb with a power source seven feet away--without any kind of physical connection.

The "WiTricity" (Wireless Electricity) system uses electromagnetism to transmit power wirelessly, so line-of-sight isn't a requirement. And here's a passage from the source article to assuage your fears of cancer or mutation caused by power flying through the air:

Magnetic coupling is particularly suitable for everyday applications because most common materials interact only very weakly with magnetic fields, so interactions with extraneous environmental objects are suppressed even further. "The fact that magnetic fields interact so weakly with biological organisms is also important for safety considerations," Andre Kurs, a graduate student in physics on the team, points out.

Ok, so it works. Now the really important questions are: Is the process expensive? How can researchers make efficient and reliable enough for everyday use on gadgets? A lot of space on today's smartphones and PDAs are taken up by the battery. Imagine how compact and portable devices will be if they can pull the power they need from the nearest power transmitter!