It’s a Monday morning; you could barely get yourself out of bed to go to the office, and you realize as soon as you get in the car that your cell phone battery is about to die. You head to Starbucks to get your much-needed dose of caffeine – and maybe in the near future, your phone could get some energy too.

Starbucks has recently announced that it will be expanding wireless charging abilities to its coffee shops in Silicon Valley, after a successful trial run in the Boston area. Doing so would be akin to their advancement of Wi-Fi more than ten years ago; in adopting wireless charging, they would in essence be adopting an industry that currently spends very little time in the public sphere. As long as a given phone is compatible, charging it at Starbucks would be as simple as setting it on a table.

But therein lies the problem: compatibility. Starbucks has selected wireless-charging technology through the Power Matters Alliance (PMA) standard, backed by Duracell Powermat. Unfortunately, rival standard Qi is currently used on a wider array of mobile devices than PMA – with Qi, any Qi-supported device can use any Qi charger, whereas with PMA, not every device is compatible with the same charger. Qi supports devices like the Nexus 7 as well as various Nokia phones, the HTC Droid and the Samsung (News - Alert) Galaxy S4; the Apple iPhone does not natively support wireless charging, so it would need an add-on case to work with PMA. In short, numerous popular phones don’t utilize the PMA standard, which makes them compatible with Starbucks wireless charging.

However, Starbucks has been working with Duracell Powermat to provide people with the necessary hardware for wireless charging. Starbucks is offering free Duracell add-on sleeves to nearby frequent customers, and Duracell says plenty of PMA-compatible products are on the way. What’s more, AT&T (News - Alert) has stated its intention to back PMA and use it in the devices they sell, although competitor Verizon is currently a member of the Wireless Power Consortium (WPC), which backs Qi.

In spite of concerns, Starbucks chief digital officer Adam Brotman thinks Starbucks has made the best choice by selecting PMA. “It is a great testing partnership, and it could get much bigger than this, but we are going to wait and see how the tests go,” he said.

The future is looking almost as bright as your eyes after a cup of coffee – or, for that matter, as bright as a wirelessly-charged phone screen.