French company Wysips is focusing on a brand new system which will cause cell phone touch screens to perform double duty as pv power panels to recharge cell phones.

The idea consists of laying a super thin transparent photo voltaic film layer together with the cellular phone display. The film could trap energy not just from the sun, but any nearby source of light.

Approximated recharge times will be about six hours from sunlight and some minutes longer from indoors lights. Wysips is at work for the 2nd release of the technology, which offers half an hour of talk-time after an hour under the sun.

The major problem with a solar battery charger is the fact that the sun moves continually, practical experience has been that you must move the solar charger every minutes to help keep it under the sun.

This production is a bit more encouraging than previous attempts to make solar battery chargers for smartphones, for example Samsung’s Blue Earth mobile, which included a solar charger on its back. A few months ago Apple was awarded a patent for a process to charge mobile units using solar energy.

The solar efficiency from Wysips’ charger happens to be only 9 %, in comparison to the most effective solar panels used elsewhere. But that is much better than the 0 % mobile phones offer now. The additional power gained from the solar charger including Wysips’ could allow cell phone designers to produce slimmer batteries for their devices, or allow for faster, more robust devices with ideal battery lives.

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Resent findings by ReadItLater via information gleaned from iPad use, has found that there has been a general move towards more evening reading and less TV.

ReadItLater is a Web service that allows users to bookmark web pages of interest to look at later. Data collected by ReadItLater has found that iPad users are ear marking their chosen text and then reading it during traditional TV prime times of 7pm to 11pm.

Of course the iPad users are possibly watching and reading concurrently, but the implication will be concerning to TV executives who rely on advertising revenues. Customers who pay only partial attention or are switching off all together don’t absorb advertising material.

Who would have thought the computer would take us full circle to provide the traditional leisure activity of winding down at the end of the day to a good book.

What is the next stage in the evolution?

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Motorola are to make Google’s new tablet. Google’s tablet will be in direct competition to Apple’s iPad, which will be good news for app developers and other software based manufacturers looking for a piece of the action.

Google’s new gadget will run from the latest Android software, nicknamed Honeycomb, which was originally developed to run tablet computers.

It is rumoured that the Google ‘pad’ will have video chat capability, an NVIDIA processor and a dual core 3D processor all on a diagonally measured 10 inch screen. The new device will be touch screen using pinching and swiping motions as with the iPad.

It is considered that in 2011 several companies will be bringing to market their own tablets which can only affect prices favourably for the consumer. Motorola will also launch a tablet called Stingray in 2011 which the Google tablet is believed to be modelled on.

This news is very good for competition and encourages further thinking with a better end-result for the consumer.

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