Apple Looking into Solar Touchscreens For iPhones

iPhones are great – except when the battery dies and all you’re left with is an expensive paperweight with an Apple logo on it. Of course it’s not all that hard at all to just hook up the charger and plug it in, but it is certainly an inconvenience sometimes – like when you’re nowhere near a power outlet and you’ve ran out of juice. But Apple may have an idea to help extend the life of your iPhone – they wouldn’t be Apple if they didn’t have some new-fangled idea, now would they?

Here’s their new(ish) idea – they want to let the sun do some of your charging for you. That’s right – they’re currently researching and looking into making their touchscreen devices have solar charging capabilities. That means future iPhones, iPads, and iPods could all feature this technology. It’s not so much of a new idea as it is an updated one – they actually started looking into this around 2008 and obtained a patent for it.

Let The Sun Charge Your Phone!

While there have been various cases which promise to soak in the sun’s rays to charge your phone, this would be the first to actually incorporate solar layers within the touchscreen layers of the phone itself. However, one should’t expect to get a full charge from the sun, as the solar layers would be limited by the size of the phone. Regardless, it would get you some extra power, and that’s always a good thing. It’s probably just going to be used as a convenience feature rather than completely replacing your charger.

If and when Apple will apply this solar technology to their devices remains to be seen, but we can hope it will be sometime in the near future.

What do you think? Is this a good idea or a waste of time? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below!

[Image via digitaltrends]

SOURCE: http://www.macrumors.com/2014/05/20/solar-panel-flexible-touchscreen-display/