How would you like to have a cellphone that never needed to be charged? That’s the promise of French company Wysips, which wants to turn your phone’s screen into a solar charger.
It works like this: a transparent photovoltaic film covers the screen of your device, and provides 250mW of power to trickle-charge the battery. The film is thin — just 100 microns or 0.1mm — and won’t dim the screen when incorporated into the LCD panel. Wysips says the film will typically add just a dollar to the cost of a phone, and hopes to have shipping units within a year.
The beauty of the design is that it scales. The bigger the screen of a device, the bigger the solar panel. A typical phone will be fully charged in six hours, and the second-gen version will give you a half-hour’s worth of power with just one hour of charging.
The real winner here will be ebooks. These typically sip power anyway, and have pretty big screens. While you may still have to plug in an iPad to charge it at night, a Kindle with Wysips’ tech in its screen would likely never, ever need to be charged, especially as you can only read it when there’s enough light to do so.
No More Chargers! article in Laptop Magazine
Wysips product page
6 Comments
PsychologicI like the solar idea, but why put it on the screen? If it's going to affect contrast/glare then I'd rather have it on the back of the phone.
EMPIREsays...probably because, if you set the phone down on your desk for example, chances are you're gonna do it screen up, so you can monitor any activity.
What I do wish they (not necessarily this company) would do is adapt this sort of technology to use in house/building windows. Consider the sheer window surface area of a modern building. You could have a small powerplant right there. (but not with this technology obviously. if that small screen is only producing 2,5 miliwatts, a whole decent sized window would produce only about 1watt of power, which is very little.)
L0ckysays...I'm surprised they got through that entire video without mentioning the environmental benefits.
Sounded like the main selling point is to save you the hassle of plugging it in.
Sadly, I think that would be a more successful selling point to be honest.
Anyway, hope the technology pans out.
ant*nature
siftbotAdding video to channels (Nature) - requested by ant.
rottenseedYou're all dumb...phones stay in our pockets/purses and usually charge at night time. Very little light in my pocket. Very little light around here during the night time. What they should do is make sunglasses with photovoltaic lenses that charge your ipod/phone/vibrating butt plug...
Discuss...
Enable JavaScript to submit a comment.