First battery-free cellphone makes calls by harvesting ambient power

[rangerrebew]

First battery-free cellphone makes calls by harvesting ambient power
July 5, 2017 by Jennifer Langston
 

University of Washington researchers have invented a cellphone that requires no batteries—a major leap forward in moving beyond chargers, cords and dying phones. Instead, the phone harvests the few microwatts of power it requires from either ambient radio signals or light.

The team also made Skype calls using its battery-free phone, demonstrating that the prototype made of commercial, off-the-shelf components can receive and transmit speech and communicate with a base station.


Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-07-battery-free-cellphone-harvesting-ambient-power.html#jCp

[Joe Wooten]

Cool!, but the article did ignore the most power hungry part of smartphones, the processor chip and associated memory uses a lot of power. All they did was eliminate the most power hungry part of the telecom portion.