The Palm Pre Touchstone will let you charge your Pre just by sitting it on top of the magnetic induction pad. That’s pretty good, but the phone and the charger still need some level of phsyical contact. Its just so.. this year.
Nokia are developing what they hope will be the future of mobile charging – Ambient Power. No, not a charger with a built-in windchime and tibetan prayer wheel (although that would be a big seller at Glastonbury, Nokia, if you are reading this) but rather a technique for using radio waves to remotely induce a charge into a battery.
The Nokia Research Center has some people at work on creating nanoscale materials that can draw charge from any wifi, radio or similar radiation that is in their vicinity. Just leaving a phone laying around where there is significant radio traffic (eg near a wifi base station) could generate enough charge to ‘trickle’ into a phone’s battery.
Nokia researchers reckon they can leech around 3-5 milliwatts at the moment, although they need to get this up to around 50 milliwatts before it is practical. It is a difficult task, and one that may yet prove impossible, but if it pays off it could mean that hunting for a charger may be consigned to the history books.
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Surely it would be dependent on how much power is being transmitted. My AP (Wireless Base Station) transmits at 100mW. Assuming you could capture 100% of its output and that it transmits continuously (that is, not as a wireless network) you might be lucky and get 50mW out of it.
But then it would have to have a super-directional yagi antenna focussing its entire output onto the phone’s charge antenna, which is impossible unless you use 100% conductive materials and connections. Which don’t exist.
So yes, while you can leech small amounts of energy from radio (I mean, hell, isn’t that how radio works?) you would have to be in an enormous electromagnetic field to start with. I suggest sticking the phone in the microwave.