Light-powered Apples

The ingenious chaps over at Apple Inc. have come up with a bright idea that may one day save you the inconvenience of lugging around chargers and spare batteries for your portable media players and mobile phones.

Solar cell technology may not yet have matured to a level where it could conceivably power an iPhone or an iPod, but Apple's recent patent actually addresses the question of where do you put them on a device in the first place. As gadgets get smaller and smaller, manufacturers are finding ever more ways to keep them functional, without resorting to the surgical enhancement of user's hands and fingers so they can operate them by tapping away on miniature keyboards. In fact there's barely enough room for some of these devices to even make their own presence known. Apple's clever idea is to locate the solar cells that will provide power to the unit, behind the touch-sensitive screen, which itself also doubles as the keyboard.

A layer of solar cells would be stacked together with the transparent or semi-transparent layers that make up the touch-sensitive areas and the display screen. Some of the ambient light penetrating into the solar cell layer would then be converted into usable electricity. However, until solar power technology improves and frees us entirely of our chargers and batteries, the proposed technique could still be used as a way of extending the battery life of portable devices.

Other companies are also working on the concept of using solar cells to provide supplementary power and the technology can be extended to a variety of devices. Motorola filed a very similar patent to the Apple one, which also involved stacking screen layers with solar cells, back in April of 2007.