Solar Cell Phone Chargers Add Green Portability
Nothing’s worse than trudging through unfamiliar territory with a flat cell phone battery without an outlet in sight. But thanks to solar powered cell phones, forlornly wandering from café to café searching for an open outlet to get a few more bars of juice may be a thing of the past.
Solar cell phones have already been launched in Kenya, where finding a circulating current is particularly difficult but catching a few rays is not. In Kenya, a cell phone user might need to walk a mile to a shopping center and pay a hefty sum just to charge his cell phone. With a solar cell phone, however, the power is gratis.
With the technology readily available and in use, it’s a small wonder why there aren’t more solar powered cell phones on the market. Samsung unveiled a solar-powered phone at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain in early 2009 and also rolled out a sun-powered phone, called the Solar Guru, in India this June. Meanwhile, HiTech Wealth has released a solar powered phone in China with a $510 pricetag.
If anything will get the major manufacturers attention, it’s likely to be the green factor of solar power phones. We’ve already seen greener phones pushed by Motorola (the W233 Renew) and Nokia, but nothing quite as bright green as a solar powered cell phone yet. For now, if you want to get right with the globe but still gab on your mobile phone, your only choice is a solar powered cell phone charger. Consider this:
According to Valery at 12VoltSolarPanels.net, if we switched our cell phone chargers over to solar, we could reduce CO2 output by an average of 290,000 tons a year. While that math has yet to be verified, a separate study by the European Commission (EC) found that if 10 percent of the world’s cell phone owners simply unplugged their cell phone chargers once their phones were charged, it would reduce energy consumption by an amount equivalent to that used by 60,000 European homes per year. So, there does seem to be a very eco-friendly argument for changing the way we charge our cell phones.
So, who will be the first to bring us solar power cell phones in North America? Will we Research in Motion release the GreenBerry? Can we expect Sony Ericsson to lead the charge for solar power? Only time will tell.
Related posts:
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- Refurbished Cell Phones, MOTO 233 Renew: Going Green With Your Cell Phones
- How can cell phones go Green?
- Green Apps for your Smart Phone
- New Nokia Concept Phone Recharges through Body Heat
- 3 Easy Ways to Reduce the Environmental Impacts of Cell Phones
- Nokia and Samsung Receive 2010 Future Mobile Green Awards
- Refurbished phones may be the ultimate “green” phones
Tags: green, solar powered phones
December 22nd, 2009 at 10:10 am
[...] Did you know that your cell phone charger sucks down energy even when it’s not plugged into your phone? As long as your charger is plugged into the wall, it’s draining electricity from the grid. It’s not much on your monthly electricity bill (about half a watt), but multiply it by billions (more, considering some of us have two or more chargers) and it adds up to enough wasted energy to power 28,000 homes each day. Solution: pull the plug once your battery’s topped up. Or better yet, get yourself a solar powered cell phone charger. [...]