If you own a smartphone, you’re already well acquainted with the fact that they tend to run through their battery life quite quickly, particularly for power users. While engineers are busy developing more powerful batteries and applications that use less power, another set is developing an answer to this issue.
Wysips, a French technology start-up, recently announced that they are working on a new solution that promises to revolutionize the way we charge our phones. Their engineering team has created a light-powered film that can be applied to a smartphone. Once applied, if the phone is left out in sunlight or even artifical light, it will slowly recharge the battery. Overall, it takes about 10 minutes of direct sunlight to provide 2 minutes of actual use time.
Ludovic Deblois, the CEO of Wysips stated, “With 10 minutes in the sun you will be able to communicate for two minutes. To recharge completely you will have to expose it for six hours, so our technology is not necessarily for a full recharge but rather for an energy boost for specific applications. For example, for security if you have to make an emergency call. So if you arrive at the airport and you have your boarding pass on the mobile you can’t have a telephone that runs out of battery so you can just put it in the light and recharge it.”
This new technology has the potential to eventually replace the need for constantly recharging our phones and it is ideal for those in emerging marketplaces. Deblois also added, “The African continent interests us in terms of market because there are more than 500 million people with a mobile telephone but it is a continent that is only 40 percent electrified, which means people need energy to recharge their telephones.”
Engineers created this film to be low-cost, which will allow just about everyone access to it. Right now, it is estimated that it costs just 1 Euro to create the film. The final price however will be set by the manufacturers who adopt the film on their phones.
This is big news for the engineering field at large. As phone companies embrace this technology, there will not only be a higher demand for engineers who can continue to improve on this invention, but it will also broaden the smartphone engineering sector.
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