http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/nokia-...-past-20090610/

I swear, ever so often there is news that reminds me that this i not my grandfathers earth, so to speak...

What no Tesla coils

As noted in the Opinion after the main article, I am skeptical of this happening any time in the near future. I've looked into it as well, and really I'm impressed that they've managed to get 5mW out of it. I think even this being the case, they should definitely include it in phones... and any other portable device to increase charge life. I'll take some of that for my laptop any day, (well... if they make it better. 5mW will probably end up giving me an extra 10 minutes on my laptop). If they can also work on the efficiency of the phone itself, as well as the batteries, then this could actually work.

However, it can't really scale as suggested by someone in the comments. "Power plants" are not feasible using this method (this was what I was looking into). Imagine if everyone in the united states didn't have to plug in their cell phones anymore. That would save alot of wasted energy. Your cellphone charger, when plugged into the wall, is always using electricity, whether or not it's attached to your phone. So, anything that can get rid of chargers is awesome in my book.

Hopefully we'll see something come of this sooner than later.

Neat. And cancer-ful.

If we take this idea a few steps further (which they will), they will be sending even more radio signals through the air at higher frequencies (to generate more power for RFID-generator technologies), causing more cancer in the world. In the magnitude of like 1 cancer cell per like 250,000 people, but still.

I honestly think cancer-causing agents are way over-rated. Eating gives you cancer. Breathing gives you cancer. Getting old gives you cancer. The only prevention to cancer seems to be death, but how fun is that?

And for the record, I've had many family members die or be treated for cancer, so don't think I'm trying to make fires around here. Just some calculated food-for-thought.

I sure hope you're wrong... If so, it would completely negate the reason I want it in the first place. =(

This should indeed be a pretty cheap thing to produce once it's properly understood, and could be very good for what Chibu recommends (both for reducing wasted electricity, and for reducing how many batteries end up in the landfill - running to 0 and recharging isn't good for them and shortens their lifespans, but it's what we expect of our cell-phones. Constantly charging helps at least ameliorate this.) Combine this with more efficient phones and you may be in business.

But yes, transmitting more radio waves for the sole purpose of charging these devices would completely negate the reason for doing it

About three years ago, my local paper ran a very short article picked up off of the AP news wire stating that researchers at Berkeley had actually achieved cold fusion. The catch was that it was a very tiny reaction and only produced miniscule amounts of energy. The article was only a paragraph or so, but there was a quote from some government official (Maybe DoD, can't remember) saying, "...we expect it to have applications in cell phones and homeland security."

Oddly enough, I haven't been able to find any reference to it anywhere since then...

So yeah, maybe they run on tiny fusion cells.

I'd check the date on that paper as well. Remember it being printed in spring? Early April?

AFAIK, every attempt to create cold fusion has failed, and the idea is believed to be false. It would be AWESOME to carry a tiny, cold fusion generator in a cheap, plastic case, all made in China with lead paint, right next to my crotch every day, but I think that's a long way off.

another thought occured to me while I was thinking about this at work: The radio waves are going to virtually disappear with this technology. Sure, alone one cellphone won't drain that much radiowaves for power, but when you replace nearly whole-sale all cellphones with this technology, that's going to start causing a problem. I imagine the power taken from those radio waves isn't returned, so that's a permanent loss of radio frequency. Start stacking that effect, and pretty soon you're drastically hampering radio signals, if not absorbing them completely.

Assume a phone is in my pocket. Is the radio wave travelling through my body going to lose that much power getting partially absorbed by the phone, then passing through me, compared to just passing through me?

i guess the best way to envision this is a wave in a pool or similar, it will move different objects at different places, and that movement can be turned into electrical energy, but unless someone is in the shadow of another wave converter, they may not notice much change.

but then again, thats not much different from the problem one currently have with signal strength inside massive buildings...

but the physics of this stuff is imo, anything but simple...

No. This is not an issue at all. if you covered your car's radio antenna with these cellphones, it probably won't work as well, you're right. But, that would happen without this tech as well. Even if all 300 million people in the United Stated had a cell (they don't) and every one of them had this technology (hopefully they will), we're talking about a minuscule fraction of a percentage of physical coverage. The only way this technology could ever be a problem on the scale that you fear is if they started to incorporate it into ALL buildings, basically making them Faraday cages to ground out the signals into some kind of battery. And even then, you would still be able to listen to the radio, make cell call, etc. when you're outside.

This technology will only "absorb" radio waves (Including, by the way, those emitted from the sun and other 'static') which happen to DIRECTLY come into contact with the device. It does not pull any radio waves in from around it. For instance, if we think only about cell signals themselves: Someone wants to call you on your cell. The network figures out where it is (based on the last tower it sent a signal to), and has that tower send out a signal in ALL directions even though your phone is only in one very specific direction at any given time. Therefore, the rest of that signal is completely useless (other than for pirate interception, which is rather illegal). With this technology, all other cellphones anywhere near that tower, can use a tiny bit of that leftover to add some power to their batteries.

So yes, if you make a wall out of these new cell phones and hold them between your phone and the tower, you might not get signal. So... don't do that?