Every once in a while, we see a manufacturer get it into its head that it wants to jump on the “green” bandwagon and try producing a handset that gets at least some of its power from sun. It’s an admirable goal, and who wouldn’t want a smartphone that they didn’t have to keep plugging-in every night in order to keep it charged? Samsung released an optional solar-charging battery cover for its Replenish, and we’ve also heard about solar-powered phones from the likes of ZTE. Nokia started thinking about the solar option recently, and put phones to the test to see just how useful a solar panel really might be.

Nokia strapped a solar panel to some handsets and sent them out for testing all around the world. Location turns out to matter quite a bit, and areas closer to the equator with more direct sun coverage saw better performance. Ultimately, the company found plenty of things that detracted from a phone’s ability to effectively harness the sun, and even under ideal conditions, the power produced was negligible, barely able to keep a phone powered in standby mode.

For these tests, Nokia used one of its feature phones, but the results carry right over to smartphones; it actually sounds like a bit of a double-edged sword, since there’s higher power consumption to deal with, but also the opportunity for larger devices with more surface area – and hence, more space for solar cells. If things sounded promising for feature phones, Nokia might have looked more into the possibility of solar-powered smartphones, but as it stands, the solar technology just isn’t mature enough to act as a phone’s primary power source.

Source: Nokia

Via: Mobile Burn