For a minute or two today, there was a lot of excitement over a patent application from Apple that many thought meant the iPhone would be able to do wireless charging, certainly a slick feature that would silence some pundits and give the iPhone a greater gee-whiz factor. Unfortunately, the hullabaloo over the inductive charging of the iPhone is somewhat misplaced.

Turns out the patent is for a dock that is not unlike that used by your portable phone or electric toothbrush, simply making it possible to have the iPhone in landscape or portrait position and still charge. Gizmodo does have some interesting speculation about the mention of a tablet in the patent application, though, which is sure to fire more rumors of an Apple tablet being in the works.

The good news is that while we may still have to charge our iPhone the old-fashioned way, the dock could potentially allow data transfer wirelessly, so you can, you know, plug in the dock several feet from your MacBook Pro and still sync it. Whether you want to transfer several gigabytes of data from your Mac to your iPhone over Bluetooth is still up for debate, though.

Filed under: iPhone News