It’ll Never Work! - Week 4
Steve Robinson:
November 17th, 2006
Every week I take a look at the strangest gadget from the past 7 days.
This week, we meet a very undemanding phone…
“Ahh! I’m in Shadow!”
Those wizards in Japan have done it again. They’ve come up with the answer to all our battery-based problems: a solar powered mobile phone! Powered only by the rays of our very own life-giving extraterrestrial orb, the phone will never again need to touch the cold steel of a mains charger’s pin. Forget emergency batteries and your phone dying in the middle of the desert - the future is bright for mobile power!
Or, so they say. Having had a little think about it, I’m not so convinced. You see, there is one tiny flaw to this otherwise ingenious plan. No, it’s not that Britain doesn’t get enough sunlight to power the unit. It’s that I very much doubt that it will get enough exposure to the sun to charge. Where do you keep your phone? In your pocket. And what is your pocket? DARK. Very, very DARK. In fact, how are you supposed to charge the phone anyway? Leave it on the table at an outdoor cafe whilst you read the paper? In five minutes not only will you never see the mains charger again, and you’ll never see the phone either. Back to the drawing board, lads…
The NTT DoCoMo Solar phone should go into production sometime next year.