Battery tech has seemed to be not keeping up in recent years of advancements on smartphones. As phones are getting more powerful and fast, feeding them with powers for a long time is getting more and more challenging, so much so that Samsung ships Galaxy S8 with screen resolution turned low by default and so much that early Xperia XZ Premium phones almost never ran at 4K resolution even though they shipped with one. In the attempts to find a solution, it looks like Researchers from the University of Washington have made a breakthrough.
The researchers have developed a very first cell phone that does not rely on the battery for power, instead, the newly designed phone harvests light and radio waves to generate enough energy to keep itself running.
In the blog post, researchers shared some information about how they made the phone:
“… the battery-free cellphone takes advantage of tiny vibrations in a phone’s microphone or speaker that occur when a person is talking into a phone or listening to a call.
An antenna connected to those components converts that motion into changes in standard analog radio signal emitted by a cellular base station. This process essentially encodes speech patterns in reflected radio signals in a way that uses almost no power….”
The phone would be almost garbage if it did not have that special energy source conversion though, as you can listen in the video below, the audio quality is barely passable, but if something like this can be improved in future and implemented in smartphones, I would be so happy to not plug the phone to wall anymore.
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