Nokia phones may use solar power (No more re-charging !!!) |
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| Date: Dec 6th, 2006 |
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Nokia phones may use solar powerImagine, you won't have to charge your mobile ever. That will be real cool..
Tero Ojanpera, Nokia's chief technology officer had this to say in an interview on the eve of two conferences.
Consumers looking for longer standby times can expect to be able to charge their phone less frequently in future. "They (standby times) will improve," he said.
Solar energy may power your cell phones. "Then there's solar energy, but I don't think it will fly until it's integrated into the phone, in some way under the surface. We're studying how to do that," Ojanpera said.
It will be fun having a mobile that never needs to be charged because of solar cells hidden under its surface. Will be really helpful, more so, while travelling.
This year another 500 million people will become mobile phone users, and most of them live in emerging economies where there is not always electricity from a socket in the wall to charge a phone.
"The next billion subscribers after the 3 billion subscribers this year will probably come from areas where electricity is not a given, he said."
As an alternative, Nokia looked at fuel cells, which generate electricity from liquid in cartridges through an electro-chemical process, but decided this was impractical.
"We need to focus on total energy management. When do you power up the chip for video processing, the radio," he said.
"Sensors will be big. Sensors that will detect movement, location, altitude," he added.
Smell could also be a feature that could one day be part of a mobile phone. "As a mass-market application it's pretty far out, but there are certain ways of releasing a smell. I believe this is possible," Ojanpera said.
Nokia is not packing features into its cell phones for the sake of it, he said. "It's not just about packing in features, like a screw driver and scissors that have nothing to do with each other."
"Fundamentally, I think the concept of a Swiss army knife is wrong. It's how we combine (related) capabilities. You can play music as an MP3 player, but you can also download music and embed it with video that you just took. How they will interact we don't even know today," he said.
In the more immediate future, consumers can expect better versions of the phones they are already familiar with, Ojanpera said. 100 gigabyte hard disks, high-definition video cameras, high-detail displays, surround sound and a built-in movie-projectors are all possible by 2009, he said. Those features will first appear on the most expensive handsets which will cost more than desktop computers.
However, Nokia is not just aiming its technology at the wealthy, Ojanpera said. Nokia is working on practical solutions for practical problems, Ojanpera said. "I'm telling the researchers: 'Don't sit in Helsinki. Go do things with people'."
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| Source: www.ciol.com |
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