Engineers at Nokia have hatched a plan for a system that'll charge phones using nothing more than ambient electromagnetic radiation, or, as you and I might put it, electricity sucked�from thin air.
It sounds a little sci-fi at first, but it's not: RFID tags are powered by electrical signals converted from electromagnetic waves emitted by a nearby sensor machine, which is exactly how this system is said to work. The thing is, the amount of electricity involved here is�tiny, and Nokia's system won't even have a base station�it'll draw from ambient electromagnetic waves, meaning Wi-Fi, cell towers and TV antennae. Nokia hopes to harvest about 50 milliwatts�not quite enough to sustain a phone, but enough to mitigate drain, and slowly charge a handset that's been switched off.
Current prototypes only gather about 5 milliwatts, which is essentially useless, and scientists and industry experts just�don't see�the technology maturing to the point that Nokia wants it to, at least in the near future. But the company's researchers are standing strong:
I would say it is possible to put this into a product within three to four years.
If you believe them, this is pretty exciting: maybe not as a primary charging mechanism, but as a battery extender.
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