Imagine charging your phone with only your body heat or your soft drink (regular not diet).  Those are two concepts for Nokia phones that would do away with the need for home chargers, car chargers and travel chargers.  In other words, you save money, the environment and eliminate down time.

Daizi Zheng has designed a cylindrical phone for Nokia that runs on your favorite soft drink.  Just pour your soft drink into the cylinder and enzymes break it down into oxygen and water since the sugar has been consumed as energy for the phone.  Daizi Zheng has written the following explanation of Green Phone for Nokia:

As a result of my research, I discovered that conventional phone batteries are: expensive, harmful to the environment and difficult to dispose of. In addition, the conventional battery manufacturing process consumes many valuable resources. The concept is based on the idea to create a pollution free environment by using bio-batteries as an alternative to conventional batteries. A bio-battery is an ecologically friendly, energy supply system which uses enzymes as a catalyst to generate electricity from carbohydrates (currently sugar). In order to use the bio-battery as a power source for the phone all that is required is a small supply of a sugary drink. Once the battery dies only oxygen and water remains. Bio-batteries are fully biodegradable and have, on a single charge, a potential life-span three to four times longer than conventional lithium batteries. Meanwhile, bio-batteries are a whole new way of looking at batteries and afternoon tea.

Split your drink with your phone and have hours of talking enjoyment.  When the battery runs down, pour out the water and add sweetened ice tea for another weeks worth of calls.  If you have a smart phone you might go through a coke a week.

Clearly phones that use Zheng’s concept are going to need some type of container for the liquid.  Although his concept phone is cylindrical that design might not be one that consumers want to purchase.  Carrying it in your pocket could be uncomfortable especially when seated.  You certainly won’t find this charging option with flip or slide phones.

Patrick Hyland has designed a self-charging phone called the Nokia E-Cu Concept rather than recharging the phone with sugar, you charge it with heat.  Carrying your phone in your pants pocket could keep your phone topped off.  Carrying the phone in  your jacket or purse won’t charge the phone because there isn’t a heat source.  Hyland’s reason for creating this phone is:

Annually, unwanted phone chargers produce 51,000 tons of waste in addition to the greenhouse gases created by the production of the electricity needed to charge them.

The Nokia E-Cu would have a built in thermogenerator that would charge the phone using heat,.  The heat could be your body heat absorbed in your pocket, radiator heat, or any other source of heat.  The back is made of copper with heatsink grooves.  As Hyland says:

It is surrounded by copper with engraved heatsinks in a dry earth pattern which represents the effect of heat on the natural environment.

The phone concept as pictured is very thin and looks like a regular candy bar phone.  The back of it does indeed look like baked earth.  Presumably this internal charging system could also be built into “smart phones” like the iPhone, BlackBerry, or Android phones.  The internal thermogenerator might need to be a tad bigger than the concept Nokia E-Cu.

Both of these concepts are innovative and would cut down on a lot of charging wires and clutter especially if these concepts translated into use with other small electronics like mp3 players and personal game consoles.  You wouldn’t need to purchase any type of charger.  Solar chargers, inductive chargers, kinetic chargers would all be obsolete as well.  Of course these are just concept designs. 

It isn’t clear whether these phones would ever make it into production.  The manufacturers who make millions of dollars from selling phone chargers certainly hope not.