Sun’s Up for Novothink’s Solar Surge iPhone/iPod Chargers

By Geoff Duncan September 4, 2009

Sun

Mobile devices might be great things, letting us take our media and stay in touch with the world wherever we go—so long as we don’t stray too far from power outlets, or forget to bring our adapters or USB cables with us. Wouldn’t it be great if we could harness free, environmentally-friendly energy sources essentially anywhere we go, and use them to keep our gizmos going?

That’s the idea behind Novothink‘s new Solar Surge solar charging cases for the iPod touch and iPhone 3G/3GS, which enable users to charge their iPods or iPhones anywhere they can get sunlight. Although the products might not be practical in the winter above the Arctic Circle (or terribly effective in the cloud-shrouded Pacific Northwest), the chargers could be great for hikers and campers who are away from power for decent lengths of time, or anyone who’s mobile lifestyle often stretches (or surpasses) their batteries’ built-in capacities.

“Solar Surge is a giant step towards incorporating solar panel technology into everyday life,” said Novothink president Ian Dorfman, in a statement. “We are incredibly proud to be offering a mobile phone solution that is not only highly functional but also affordable and environmentally responsible.”

The Solar Surge cases including solar panels on the back the provide 0.5V at 100 mAh in full sunlight; the units also incorporate a 1500 mAh lithium-ion polymer battery with 120 percent of the capacity of a standard iPhone 3G battery. The units offer a 4-stage LED battery indicator, and a custom-engineered USB 2.0 cable that provides both high-capacity charging and data connectivity.

The Solar Surge cases will be available in a variety of colors, with the Solar Surge for iPod touch going on sale at the end of this month for a suggested price of $69.95; the iPhone 3G/3GS version should follow in the fourth quarter.

Editors' Recommendations

The best solar chargers for your phone or tablet

Topics

Emerging Tech

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

Computing

This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio

acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

News

Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards

Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

News

Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards

Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.