Keep in mind that I'm no scientist, but I am a consumer who recently purchased a watch that has a kinetic battery.
What this means is that the battery recharges each time the watch moves. Effectively, as I move my arm to write, to retrieve a pocketed item, or to drive my car, the battery inside recharges. Once fully charged, it can last for 24 hours without any movement at all.
How about a kinetic battery for cell phones?
First of all, it is incredibly frustrating to cut a call short because the battery is dying. Worse than that is not being able to make a call because the phone is without power.
Secondly, consider how often a normal cell phone moves around in a typical day as it goes from pockets to purses to hands to ears. There is plenty of movement that would produce kinetic energy for usage power and for stored power.
Therefore, I propose binding kinetic battery technology to cell phones. With that, we could forget the days of "car chargers" and cut down on conversation interruption.
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Great idea! I am not sure how this would affect the actual engineering of the phone in terms of size and weight, but it seems quite feasible. I like the idea that this would increase the battery life as well as account for instances where we need a little extra juice to complete a phone call. An adaptation to this could all be using solar power to generate small amounts of energy to recharge the battery. Of course, this would not be useful in a pinch.
In reality, for current cell phone technology, kinetic generators don't produce enough power to effectively charge a cell-phone battery, witout siginificalty adding to the mass of the phone, and requiring significant work to charge.
I like the concept. Science needs to catch up with creativity.
Although current technology may not support this innovation, once technology improves sufficiently this kinetic cell phone battery would be a hit.
My watch that's about 40 years old is also kinetic and it's great, but the power generated is very small compared to what cell phones use. As a complementary power source I think it would be a great idea until new techs are available. MIT's developed a new type of battery using old and new technology, capacitors and nanotubes. They charge in seconds, and don't need to be replaced.
I love this idea! Though, with the continuing advancement of smart phones (e.g. blackberry, iPhone) that are increasingly complex and no doubt require more power, there would need to be some equivalent advancement in harnessing more energy through relatively limited motion. Perhaps you could keep the traditional chargers, but the kinetic battery would serve as an extender of outlet-charged battery life?