Consumables, a Cause and Literature
A collection of notable events, latest consumables and interesting websites
NOKIA PHONE
SHAKE, RATTLE AND CHARGE
Is Nokia planning a mobile phone that can generate battery life purely by the power of movement?
As any smartphone user knows, once you’ve checked your Facebook account, sent a couple of emails and made some calls, your phone’s battery is already beginning to fl ag. Nokia plan to change that charge-every-night ethos by creating a phone that’s charged by your movement.
A patent the Finnish company has filed shows plans for a mobile phone that utilises the energy created as you move to power it, much like kinetic watches have done on a smaller scale for years. It does so using piezoelectric crystals, which create an electric current when bent or compressed. Previously these crystals could only be created at high temperatures, but a breakthrough by scientists from Princeton and MIT suggests they could be printed onto rubber, making them suitable for mobile phone components.
“In our watches, the wearer’s movement causes an oscillating weight to spin, which generates a magnetic charge through gearing,” says Mark Willingham, national account executive at Seiko, who pioneered kinetic watches in the 1980s. Nokia’s phone would use a variant of this technology – see “How it works” for details.
Obviously a phone requires more energy than a watch, and whether general, day-to-day movement would create enough power to run one is open to debate.
The first time you used an iPhone you probably marvelled at how slick the touchscreen was. Well there’s a new screen technology coming that’ll make an iPhone look like a toy.
