I know I’ve made my far share of “wireless power isn’t on today” jokes and made fun of more than a few people who are suffering power issues from “high impedance air gaps,” but Nokia is looking to charge their phones wirelessly in the future. This isn’t any fancy electromagnet setup you have to be within harmful radiation distance of, it is charging you phone in your pocket as you walk down any city street.

The basic idea here is that there are so many electronic signals out there (i.e. cell phone towers, satellite TV, radio stations, your wireless router, etc…) that one could literally produce energy from them. The waves will cause an oscillation and that in turn mixes with some laws of physics that I only got a C on after I cheated off the smart girl in class and they turn into enough power to do something useful with. Apparently this is much the same ways that RFID systems work where electromagnetic waves are converted into electric signal, the difference being that this system will store the energy from that signal rather than interpret it.

Right now they are only able to produce 3 to 5 milliwatts, but if they get a receiver as big as they hope, like from 500 megahertz to 10 gigahertz, they think they could get 50 milliwatts out of the charging system. This isn’t going to give you the power to stream all of Ozzfest to the internet from your iPhone, but it could charge a dead phone, or if you had a phone with pretty low power usage when it’s closed, you might even be able to slowly charge it as you go about your day which is pretty cool.

Harry Ostaffe, head of marketing for a company (powercast) that makes similar products says that it would take 1,000 strong signals to produce 50 milliwatts, but lucky for him more and more things that produce electromagnetic waves are built built (or plugged in) every day. As has been the trend of my last few posts, this is pretty cool to begin with, but holy cow this early technology could turn into something truly awesome with some serious R & D and even more imagination.

Here’s some linky goodness:

MIT Beta Technology Review: http://beta.technologyreview.com/communications/22764/

Nokia Blog On the Topic: http://conversations.nokia.com/2009/06/10/ambient-power/