Month: May 2017

Solar power isn’t exactly new but there has been a bit of a surge in new products over the last few years, especially for those everyday items.

You can now save a considerable amount of money on your electricity bills, especially if you are running and charging devices using the sun! Did you know there are now many solar powered phone chargers, radios, Bluetooth speakers and lights? These everyday items are not just great for backpackers looking to keep their gadgets running when they’re away from electricity, they are also great at home. Why not switch from a radio that uses electricity to one that uses the sun, or spend more time charging your devices with solar powered chargers rather than those that plug into your wall? There are lots of ways you can save more of your hard earned money and using solar powered gadgets is a pretty good place to start.

Over the years, phones have improved considerably. It’s a fact that they’re not even called phones now, they’re called smartphones, and they’re essentially small computers.

We use them to send email, browse the web, book in at restaurants, schedule meetings, play music, take photos, check Facebook, video call and monitor our fitness. But even with these many improvements, mobile phone chargers still take a considerable amount of time to fully charge a mobile phone.

That said, in 2018 we could have mobile phone chargers for smartphones that can fully charge the device in just 5 minutes! This would be a huge boost, and the technology was first shown off in 2015, when Israeli start-up StoreDot demonstrated its FlashBattery at the CES tech show in Las Vegas. At the moment it takes approximately 2 hours to charge from 0% to 100%, so how realistic is it that StoreDot can roll their product out by 2018? Well, Ben Wood, a technology analyst at CCS Insight, said he had doubts about the claims. He feels as though it would be a risk as phones can generate a great deal of heat when they’re charging so there may be problems whilst the battery performance could be impacted.

There’s no doubt that mobile phone chargers are improving through the years, and charging times will be reduced once more in 2018, but it may be a bit too ambitious to believe that most phones will fully charge in less than 5 minutes within the next couple of years. It will be interesting to see what happens in the near future, but perhaps being patient will be better for us and the mobile phone industry. It’s not too big a deal to have to wait an hour or two for your device to charge and there are many portable chargers that make life easier, so it’s not really a big issue right now.

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