Samsung's Animated, Flexible OLED Passport

via Gizmodo by John Herrman on 6/19/09

Announced last year, this technology sounded more than a little bit pie-in-the-sky. A flexible OLED passport? With video capabilities? And it's powered wirelessly? Yet here it is, captured in full sight, on video.

And I'll be damned if it doesn't work perfectly. Alongside a static picture, this e-passport displays a rotating photographic avatar when placed near a power source. OLED-Info thinks the card is pulling power from an RFID reader, but given that the display is full-fledged 320x240, 260k color OLED panel that's playing video, I tend to think there's a more powerful type of inductive charging going on here.

Nokia Developing Wireless Ambient Charging

via�Gizmodo�by John Herrman on 6/10/09

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.