Nokia is working on a brand new way of keeping your phone at full charge without you ever having to charge it! It may sound like the stuff of sci-fi but the brainiacs over at the Nokia Research Centre on Cambridge are working on exactly that. How does this system work? Join us after the space-jump to find out how…

The Nokia Research Centre in Cambridge, UK, is working on a brand new technology that will allow your Nokia phone to re-charge without ever going anywhere near a re-charger. The idea is that any future technology will be able to draw power from ambient radio waves in the air, so negating the need to tether and charge your phone.

We’re not even going to start to pretend to understand how this will work but apparently it works on using ambient electromagnetic radiation that is already in the air.

Ambient electromagnetic radiation, the sort of stuff that is given off by your Wi-Fi transmitters, Mobile phone antenna and even giant TV mast, could be harnessed and converted into sufficient electrical power to top up your battery simply as you walk around.

Current experiments have managed to harvest between 3 to 5 milliwatts of power but in order for it to be effective, over 50 milliwatts needs to be sucked from the ambient radiation around us.

So, it seems we’re still tied to the charger with our phones for now. However, in the future who knows, we’ll no longer be able to use the excuse of ‘Oh, I didn’t call you because, erm… my battery died!’

Via: Technology Review