Solar-Powered Screens May Soon Charge our Phones
Until this week, French startup Wysips was not well known to the general public. They sure made their mark at this year’s CTIA Spring show by showing up to one of the show’s big press events with a very intriguing prototype in hand. Wysips has found a way to shrink a solar panel into a light transparent film that is applied onto the screen of your phone.
The idea of this film is to capture energy from either the sun or a nearby light source (such as a lamp), convert that energy into power, and make it so your phone does not even require a large battery. A battery would still be required because the solar power just simply would not be enough to power a fully-functional smartphone. The power coming from light would be equivalent to a trickle-charge; directly in the sunlight it would take 6 hours to completely charge a regular battery, and indoors it would take even longer than that.
However, the hope is that these solar-powered screens would make it possible to limit the bulkiness of today’s batteries, and improve their efficiency. Imagine how much thinner phones could be if the thickness of the battery could be trimmed down.
This particular film is superthin at less than 100 microns, transparent, and flexible. It won’t affect the sensitivity required to touch your screen so you can still use the touchscreen as normal.
Wysips is currently working to woo OEMs, phone carriers, and mobile display companies and is confident that this technology will be ready to ship and/or integrate with phones and tablets within the next 12 months. It will be a race to see if they can beat the AT&T/T-Mobile merger!
This concept, if accepted and integrated into phones, could significantly reduce the thickness of phones and tablets; it can also help bring down manufacturing costs by trimming the battery, and we hope that any cost savings with this would bring down product pricing. Cheers to Wysips and we hope to see this come down the pipeline very soon.
via Laptop Mag