Whether motivated by a desire to be 'green', whether you have a real need to be self-sufficient while trekking, or whether you simply don't want to waste all this sunlight, you'll be interested in Steve's review of the GoSolar charger.
Read on in the full article.
Looks interresting but even more interresting would be a solar charger that could be used to charge the spare battery whithout needing to be connected to the phone while you're out in the wild with your smartphone. Because with the current system, if it takes a whole day to charge a battery, this means that you've got to give up on using your phone every other day. Not that interresting really. I suppose that the problem in making a standalone phone battery charger is that there are so many different phone batteries that it would be too expensive to produce.
There are universal standalone battery chargers. They have adjustable contact points for the charging terminals, and a spring loaded base to hold different sized batteries in place. The ones I've seen all work pretty well.
elp: no, no, no, you've misunderstood! You leave the charger in the sun somewhere, while you're off living life, then you plug your smartphone into it overnight and transfer the charge while you sleep. No downtime required. 8-)
Steve
elp wrote:Looks interresting but even more interresting would be a solar charger that could be used to charge the spare battery whithout needing to be connected to the phone while you're out in the wild with your smartphone. Because with the current system, if it takes a whole day to charge a battery, this means that you've got to give up on using your phone every other day...
The way I understand it, the charger has its own internal battery and it is that one that takes the entire day to get charged. Once the chargers internal battery is full, you connect it to the phone and tranfer the charge... a process equivalent to a "normal" charging as far as time goes, eg. an hour or two.
So you dont have to give up using your phone every other day. Provided that the sun shines of course...
My bad then. It looks a lot more interesting now that i know that it can be left alone while charging.