A stylus looks cool in your hand (to say nothing of being useful) while sketching out a detailed drawing, but it's a lot less cool when it's sticking out of a charging port to juice up. The Universal Stylus Initiative want to change that with a plan to enable wireless charging for USI styluses — using the NFC technology found on many modern smartphones.

The partnership between USI and the NFC Forum should allow NFC-enabled devices (pretty much all high end mobile phones) to charge USI styluses wirelessly at a rate of 1W. That's not very powerful, but for something as simple as a stylus, convenience might be key.

The goal of USI is to enable a single standard for digital pen technology that enables high-quality styluses that work on a variety of devices from different manufactures. Many modern Chromebooks support the USI standard, including the popular Lenovo Chromebook Duet tablet. While there aren't too many USI stylus available on the market yet, it seems like this new alliance could make future stylus products that much more attractive.

Source: NFC Forum