Solar chargers for mobile phones are a dime a dozen. Well, they’re not that cheap – but they are plentiful. What really we haven’t seen are decent phones that run directly off solar energy. No charger middleman, no connection to a secondary device, just an all-in-one, fully integrated, photovoltaically juiced wireless telecommunications module.
Kudos, then, to the folks at Nokia for giving it a shot with a phone it called Lokki. Mind you, by all appearances this was more a quest to satisfy their own curiosity rather than develop an actual product. They tricked out a Nokia C1-02 with a solar panel in the back and scattered the phones to a handful of folks around the world to give ’em a whirl. The result: The solar phone isn’t ready for prime time. It isn’t that you can’t run a phone on solar power produced on the phone itself; you just can’t do it for very long unless you’re obsessed with keeping it exposed to sunlight. And the sun never sets. And there are no clouds. Ever.
“When carefully positioned, the prototype phones were able, at best, to harvest enough energy to keep the phone on standby mode but with a very restricted amount of talk time,” Nokia reported on its “Conversations” blog. “This means there’s still some way to go before a workable and care-free solution is achieved. The most substantial challenge is the limited size of a phone’s back cover, which restricts the extent to which the battery can be charged. What’s more, to ensure mobility, it is essential that the phone’s weather protection doesn’t cover the solar charging panel.”
One tester who was able to make some good use of the phone was Amos Omondi, in Kenya. As Nokia noted, Kenya is a place that could really use a solar phone, since 85 percent of its people live without electricity. Omondi used his Lokki to make calls, access the Internet and even listen to soccer matches on the radio. But with the tiny solar panel struggling to keep the phone charged, he had to be constantly mindful, as this one diary entry of his indicates: “I decided to put the phone in the sun. My children were very excited to see the phone blinking, an indication that it’s charging and they started asking me questions about the phone. As the children were disturbing the phone I decided to put the phone on top of the roof for about four hours. When I took it down it was charged to one bar.”
According to data recorded by Nokia, over the course of 59 days with the phone Amos – who often set the phone out in the sun while he worked as a security guard – “gained 20 hours talk time or sufficient standby for 41 days.” Another tester, camping out up around the Arctic Circle, was able to take advantage of the endless summer sun in a six-day period to talk for 1.4 hours.
So the possibilities for the solar phone appear to be limited, and largely dependent on your ability or willingness to expose it to sunshine. As Nokia wrote, “Reasonably good results were … obtained when the tester was able to carry the phone while moving around outdoors, for instance in a holder around his neck. However, this isn’t necessarily the most stylish or convenient arrangement, and another solution is needed.”