• By Ryan Whitwam on July 27, 2015 at 3:55 pm

Monitors have gotten thinner, bigger, and brighter over the years, but Samsung thinks it might have figured out the next feature people will want in their desktop monitors: wireless phone charging. The newly announced SE370 monitor will come in both 23.7 and 27-inch versions with a fancy stand containing a Qi wireless charger. Sure, you could buy a separate wireless charging pad, but that’s for peasants. Everyone knows the coolest way to charge is with a monitor.

This product is a great opportunity for Samsung to talk up the Galaxy S6, which is the first Samsung device to have wireless charging built-in. In the past, Samsung made customers buy replacement back panels that added wireless charging to devices for $40-50. The Galaxy S6is completely sealed, so Samsung opted to include both Qi and PMA wireless standards.

The monitor uses Qi, which is the standard almost all other phones with wireless charging have. You should be able to place any compatible phone on the SE370 stand to charge it. That includes devices like the Nexus 6 and LG G4 (with the wireless charging back).

Is it really necessary that you have a wireless charger inside the monitor? Not particularly, but it does look cool and should please anyone who likes to keep a tidy desktop. There are no extra cables to deal with as the phone charger is powered by the monitor.

Beyond the perhaps gimmicky wireless charging pad, the SE370 has a Plane-to-Line-Switching (PLS) panel, which is Samsung’s alternative to standard IPS panels. The LCD on this monitor will be brighter (300 nits) and have improved viewing angles (178 degrees) compared with most IPS screens. The resolution of both sizes will be just 1920×1080, but the PLS technology should allow for improved visual quality compared to IPS and vastly better than budget TN panels. That might make up for the resolution somewhat.

The monitor also supports AMD FreeSync to match the refresh rate of the panel to the frame rate of a game (only over DisplayPort). This requires an AMD GPU from the last few generations, so it won’t work if you’ve got an Nvidia card. By syncing up the refresh and frame rate, the monitor can eliminate tearing and stuttering from rapid movement with no performance penalty.

Samsung didn’t mention price or availability in the post, but it’s probably not going to be cheap. Samsung’s last PLS-based monitor in the 27-inch range was originally priced at $850, but it did have a higher resolution.