Never charge your phone again... ever.

Most of us spend a good deal of time with a cell phone glued to our ear, producers especially. And all of us have been stuck at one time or another with a desperate need to make a call, and a dead or near dead battery. Even if you happen to have a charger on you, an electrical outlet is usually not available in a cab or on the sidewalk. The clever engineers at Nokia may have solved this problem forever, with a self charging cell phone. Yes, you read that correctly, a phone that charges itself with no need to plug it in anywhere.



I used to work on Nokia, and I always found their product line to be extremely innovative, incorporating gadgets and features just not found on other phones (a heart rate monitor, a flashlight, a phone the size of a lipstick tube). We don't see these phones in the US, because our selection of phones is limited to what Verizon or T-Mobile or AT&T decide they want to offer us. But in other countries where you shop for the phone, and not the service, you can get some pretty sweet handsets.

Anyway, this phone charges itself by harvesting ambient radio waves that are bouncing around in the air, invisible to us, and turning those waves into electricity. I've often wondered what life would be like if we could see all the different kind of energy waves we are surrounded by on a daily basis. Radio waves, TV signals, cell phone signals, microwaves, WiFi... there's enough of these waves just hanging out around us to create usable power. If each one of these had a color and was visible, we probably wouldn't be able to see an inch in front of our faces! It makes me wonder what effects this daily wave bath will have on us in the long term.

This technology won't be rolled out for 3 to 5 years, but when it is, the "I forgot to charge my phone" excuse will be as relevant as a 1 hour photo booth.