Charge Your Phone With A Paper-Thin Solar Panel

While it may not be practical, charging your smartphone or other portable device with solar panels is certainly a novel idea. These paper-thin panels can actually be joined together to generate more power.

A single panel can generate about 2.5 watts of electricity, and "you can connect more panels with magnets for more power." In sunny weather, two joined panels "can fully juice an iPhone 6 in about two and a half hours."

This is great!

Not bad for under 100$. Might have to get me one.

Noice. Snagging a 3 panel for myself...should be able to cope with a cloudy Seattle winter through a bus window.

Maybe a solar panel is better for extended multiple chargings on trips away from outlets (camping or hermiting), but I'd rather get a portable battery pack instead. There are various small chargers that are more convenient in the $20 range and weigh about the same as a single one of those solar panels. Plus a battery pack is going to be harder to damage than an unprotected, brittle solar panel which under ideal conditions charges 4x slower than that Anker battery pack.

Cool idea!
I always forget to charge my phone in time.

I don't see the point of these unless camping or going for long bits of time away from any place to charge. In normal day to day as said, the battery packs are better, some are quite hardy and can change most phones 2-4 times depending on choice and can be pretty small.

For camping or outdoors, I would not get this, looks very VERY fragile, there are also other choices, such as the protected PV chargers that fold into a bag if you will, much larger, but also put out 20W vs 2.5W and cost under $100. Being that they put out so much more power, they can be used for more as well, or charging more than one device pretty quick. Most also have hooks or holes to hang from the back of a backpack so it can charge devices while moving, or charge a battery pack to power devices later or at night.

I think the implementation is really clever. But the claim is likely direct cloudless sunlight with the panels kept 90 deg. to the sun at all times. Some folks are up for dramatic disappointment

jpm100 said:

I think the implementation is really clever. But the claim is likely direct cloudless sunlight with the panels kept 90 deg. to the sun at all times. Some folks are up for dramatic disappointment

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Indeed.

You also have to keep in mind that is still only putting out 2.5W under perfect conditions. Willing to bet how most people would want to use this it will not even charge the phone.

Like the comment about cloudy day use (panels only put out 5-25% of their rated capacity in weather like this, depending on how thick the cover is), even with 3 panels, the results will probably be disappointing to them, if it even generates enough current to charge the phone at all. I also know that buses here in Texas at least all have well tinted windows, which I am sure that the tint plus a cloudy day would make these useless.

That's very expensive.

Interesting.. but the idea of leaving both the panels and phone sitting in the hot Houston sun is.. meh. Heck, just sitting my old Galaxy S3 in the car window while driving in the summer with the A/C on would result in "overheat" warnings. Can't imagine the phones being happy sitting in the blistering sun at the beach.

Now, throw a couple of these on top of an umbrella with a long enough cord... that could be useful for the few times we go to the beach, but not at that price.

farscapesg1 said:

Interesting.. but the idea of leaving both the panels and phone sitting in the hot Houston sun is.. meh. Heck, just sitting my old Galaxy S3 in the car window while driving in the summer with the A/C on would result in "overheat" warnings. Can't imagine the phones being happy sitting in the blistering sun at the beach.

Now, throw a couple of these on top of an umbrella with a long enough cord... that could be useful for the few times we go to the beach, but not at that price.

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For beach use, the ones I talked about before have pouches built in to keep phones out of the sun.