What’s Wrong With The Solar Powered Cell Phone?
Let’s face it: many of us can’t go outside our houses without our cell phones. If you’ve got a Sidekick or a Blackberry or any other phone that slices, dices, makes french fries and helps you surf the internet, your battery probably only lasts a day (at most) until you have to charge it. Whenever we have to go somewhere for more than say.. 12 hours, our chargers are always in tow. So it was only a matter of time until some green minded folks came up with a solar powered cell phone.
Not only green, but CHEAP too! Some of these suckers would retail for LESS THAN $50 BUCKS. Personally, my eyes lit up and I got incredibly excited when I first heard about it. But it looks like the hype just don’t cut it…
Steve debunks the mythical solar powered phone after the jump (PICTURES)!
As exciting as this technology really is, there are a few hurdles:
-It’s kinda fugly: it doesn’t really look like a streamlined phone that someone would take with them on a daily basis… it looks like a videogame controller.
-It’s kinda useless: while a few solar powered phones can pull in enough juice to keep themselves going for a while, some of these phones (most notably this kinda sexy one) take 10 minutes of solar charging for one minute of talk time… which is kinda goofy. By that math, you’d have to leave the sucker out for 10 HOURS (from 9 AM to 7 PM) for 1 HOUR of talk time.
-IT’S FREAKIN’ DANGEROUS: Think about what happens when you leave a car with black seats in the sun for a few hours… you come back and the seats are HOT. Same concept… if you leave a black plastic cell phone out in the sun for several hours, it’ll probably blow the hell up.
Don’t get me wrong: the idea is crazy promising. For developing communities across the world, where electricity is a precious commodity, a solar powered cell phone is an incredibly ecofriendly and cost-effective concept to spread the flow of communication.. but it’s kinda difficult to do it right. Guess we’ll have to wait and see.
