Taking a mobile to a festival is brilliant for finding lost friends after they wander off in a daze while you stand around gawping at crustys doing ‘circus skills’. When the juice runs out, though, you are just left with a useless lump of plastic.
You could try Solar power, but given the standard British festival experience, it’s best not to put all your hopes on the sunshine.
If you are at the O2 Wireless festival at Hyde Park next weekend, you could try charging your mobile with O2’s array of generators hooked up to bicycles.
Choppers, racers, BMXs - take your pick and get pedalling. Weirdly, O2 have no plans to launch a mobile charger that you can take awayto use on your own bike. I rememeber having a Dynamo powered light on my bike when i was a kid - surely even the small amount of power generated could be used to top up a portable charger?
The iPhone has a pretty decent battery life at around 8 hours of talk time, but with an ‘unreplaceable’ battery that will eventually lose some of its ability to hold a charge you will still end up lugging the charger with you on anything but a weekend away.
Apple has filed a patent that might mean that in the future you can ditch the charger, and do a little bit to help the environment as well by integrating solar power into mobile handsets.
The problem with slapping a solar panel on a phone is where do you put it? Once you haveleft space for a screen and (traditionally, anyway) a keypad you don’t have a great deal of real estate to play with.
The patent, entitled “Solar cells on portable devices” suggests that a solar cell could have other transparent materials layered onto it - providing a surface that can be used for display or input.
In other words, that lovely big iPhone screen might be able to double up as a lovely big solar power plant.
Given that we don’t all live in Cupertino, it’s likely that this will be intended to augment an existing mains charger by topping up the battery whenever there is sufficient sunlight, but it’s a start - and with a decent summer you may not have to plug in for months.
Just don’t be tempted to go somewhere brighter just for the sake of your phone - you know what hell iPhone roaming charges can be.
As the world economy crumbles and we slide down the greasy metaphor towards financial disaster the wise investor might consider putting what remains of their money in something a little more solid than paper.
Property is right out, obviously, so many are plumping for the reliability of precious metals. This has led to a phenomenon called ‘Urban Mining‘, where enterprising companies strip dead mobile phones and similar gadgets down to their bones to get at the tiny amounts of gold hidden away in their components.
Well, I say tiny, but it seems that the average mobile phone contains more gold per gram than the average chunk of gold ore. A ton of gold yields around 5 grams of gold, but a ton of knackered phones can contain up to 150 grams. With gold selling for over $30 a gram, there is a lot of money to be made.
Copper, tin, silver and iridium can also be found in most handsets. Leaving these metals to rot in a landfill is Very Bad, environment-wise, so the Urban Miners are actually performing a valuable service as well as lining their pockets.
If you wanted to get in on the phone recycling act, but don’t fancy grubbing about in landfill sites, a company called Mazuma will happily send you some cash for your old mobile - then recycle it to a good home.
With many environmentalists concerned with the amount of energy that is wasted by devices that remain plugged in on standby it is worth bearing in mind that most phone chargers spend more time plugged in and not charging anything at all. Even if you unplug it when not in use, if you charge your phone overnight, the phone will be fully charged after a few hours and you are wasting energy.
Nokia has come up with one solution in the form of the ‘Zero Waste’ charger. This clever little device works a little bit like one of those power-surge protectors you might use with a lawnmower or a drill. A big green button on the back of the charger turns on the power. When your phone is charged, the button pops out and the power is cut off.
Nokia news blog NokNok.tv got their hands on a prototype model and put together this video for your viewing pleasure:
The planet is in trouble. The climate is changing, icecaps are melting and the air around us is choking up with pollutants and you, yes YOU, are making it worse every time you plug your mobile into the wall.
What is required is some way of telling you that your mobile is fully charged and you can stop plugging it directly into the still-beating heart of spaceship earth. Somebody caring, somebody conscientious, somebody.. er.. small and furry.
www.mocarbon.com is an initiative from Australian mobile developers Moket that provides an animated Flash background of a squirrel who will helpfully let you know that your ohone needs charging, tell you when it is plugged in and then get all arsey with you if you don’t unplug it again when the battery is full.
Seriously, the little fella goes from the polite “Your phone is now charged. Please unplug your charger” to yelling “DO IT!” while shaking its tiny squirrel fist at you.
There is a selection of other characters too - I quite like the bear. The bear looks like he really, really wants to help but will be forced to cut you if you go against his wishes.
No pricing info available as the parent site is undergoing a refit at the moment, but a list of Flash 1.1 compatible handsets is available here.
“Funny, I could have sworn that was fully charged this morning..”
We’ve all been there - you pull out your phone to make a call, only to find that all your lovely ‘leccy has drained away. Not only are you unable to tell the world that you are on the train, you will have to charge your phone when you get in and the environment will take another beating.
One common cause is running an app that takes more than its fair share of battery power, either by being poorly written, or by over-using certain components like the vibrator.
It’s not ideal - so Nokia has released Energy Profiler to try and sort things out. Although it is intended for developers to streamline their new apps, there is nothing to stop us mere mortals from loading it up and using it to find out which shareware Tetris clone is killing the planet. One Nokia developer is asking users to email Nokia and ask them to release a more consumer-focused version of the app via Nokia Beta Labs.
Nokia Energy Profiler runs on S60 3rd Edition phones with Feature Pack 1.
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