The Palm Pre Touchstone will let you charge your Pre just by sitting it on top of the magnetic induction pad. That’s pretty good, but the phone and the charger still need some level of physical contact. Its just so.. this year.

Nokia are developing what they hope will be the future of mobile charging – Ambient Power. No, not a charger with a built-in windchime and tibetan prayer wheel (although that would be a big seller at Glastonbury, Nokia, if you are reading this) but rather a technique for using radio waves to remotely induce a charge into a battery.

The Nokia Research Center has some people at work on creating nanoscale materials that can draw charge from any wifi, radio or similar radiation that is in their vicinity. Just leaving a phone laying around where there is significant radio traffic (eg near a wifi base station) could generate enough charge to ‘trickle’ into a phone’s battery.

Nokia researchers reckon they can leech around 3-5 milliwatts at the moment, although they need to get this up to around 50 milliwatts before it is practical. It is a difficult task, and one that may yet prove impossible, but if it pays off it could mean that hunting for a charger may be consigned to the history books.

The idea is to tap into the energy carried by the radio waves that pervade our everyday lives. Everyday, we swim through a soup of EM radiation – why not put all that energy to work? At the moment, Nokia is only able to draw 3-5 mW of power from a nearby radio source (like a WiFi base station). Nokia needs to hit 50 mW of “ambient charging” power draw to make the technology viable. Whether Nokia is able to pull it off is still not clear, but it’s good to know we have some creative Nokia boffins toiling away to drive mobile innovation!

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