Having to plug your cell phone into the wall or car to charge it every day is so 20th century and so far behind in the way we need our technology to function, that it’s about time someone has started to put serious research into a cell phone that can charge itself, without the wires. Apparently the Nokia Research Center in Cambridge, England thinks the same thing and are working on a way to charge our wireless phones wirelessly.
Thinking about our mobile lifestyles and how more and more often our phones are becoming our personal life assistants, it’s almost laughably archaic to think that we still need to be tethered to a power outlet and cord every 24 hours or so to juice up our devices again. Nokia is going to change that, if they have their way. Their new system would collect energy from the radio waves emitted by just about everything we use (TVs, antennas, WiFi things and so forth). Essentially the Nokia phones would catch these radio waves floating around in the air and harness them for energy.
Currently the prototype can do about 5 milliwatts of energy, apparently enough to keep a phone on standby charged indefinitely. They want to get it up to 50 milliwatts, which won’t keep the phone charged when we’re spending inordinate amounts of time watching video clips on Facebook, but will be able to slowly recharge the battery. The only real problem I foresee from this method of charging cell phones is that teenagers will suddenly start hanging out at the front of mall stores hoping to charge their phones from the RFID technology used in the alarm systems to keep shoplifters from carrying product out the door.
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