I'm interested in the future of charging? Will it be possible Anker will have items such as charging using your body movement? If biking using the bike to charge?

I’ve wondered how charging will be in the future. Will portable power banks even be needed if phone batteries or other batteries can hold charges for days, weeks? I know that some products exist now that use your body movement to charge but aren’t really that good now, will this ever be good enough clean alternative product?

1 Like

Well anker already do a solar charger so maybe? It would be very interesting to see just how much energy can be converted when we are walking or cycling.

Cycling could be a potential way, as for walking you would probably have to cover a fair distance to yield a worthwhile charge. Running could be a different matter however :wink:

My wife used to have a Samsung phone that came with a solar charging back cover. It was a good idea but in reality not very effective for a variety of reasons, not least of which the fact that having to leave your phone in direct sunlight meant it got very hot. That was years ago though and I wonder if the technology has progressed to where it would be worth revisiting.

1 Like

I think this is more an area of development for phones themselves. They should all have a photovoltaic layer on the screen and also be able to get energy from movement of the device.

So I bike for pleasure and commuting and my two bikes I use for these both have a SON hub in front wheel and a B&M Luxos U which has a USB port and I charge my phone while biking. I tend to head out with a charged phone and get back with a charged phone.

There is a theoretical energy form of space-time but its barely at the hypothetical level right now. Basically there is an energy in empty space manifest as a non-zero energy level (Higgs field) and there are weak wave forms. You could theoretically extract energy out of thin air. Not without its risks as it may cause a black hole and suck you in to oblivion.

I have a solar panel (not Anker) and its really there for theoretically long events like say power grid goes off for >week or I want to go camping for a week its not left the house since I got it.

1 Like

Energy density of batteries far exceeds energy density output. Whenever I do the math the weight+volume just points to carrying a bigger battery. Solar’s problem is if you put solar right next to the phone, the phone necessarily is being kept hot in the sun and heat ages battery.

Whenever I look at weight of say a hand crank generator it takes hours to get the same electricity as say a Powercore+ Mini.

We’ll need a major technology change like more efficient solar tech coatings built into the phones themselves to get trickle charge when outdoors but is the cost worthwhile?

Photovoltaics are getting cheaper and more efficient all the time. I’ll be disappointed if phone screens don’t help to charge the phone in a few years time.

I really like the idea of renewable energy. I studied a little bit about it, and I feel like the easiest one they could make is for bikes as it is a constant form of movement and has little movement variation.

1 Like

Well actually energy from bikes is not renewables because most food that most people eat to fuel their bikes from food which has some use of fossil fuels in their harvesting, transport, storage, preparation.

A solar panel needs to be mass produced and used for a long time to offset its fossil footprint cost.

So combining solar with a phone… given the phone is often used for 2 years… not sure it would be a net benefit or a net worse.

I believe this is called greenwashing. Appears green but isnt?

1 Like

This idea is pretty funny but cool as well. Maybe like a hamster running on a wheel??