Web Worker Daily

As reported in more detail on our parent blog GigaOM, Idaho-based M2E Power is on to something new in the land of cell phone chargers. Next year they’ll be selling a charger that gets its energy just by being carried around while you walk – it’s in the same general physics realms as those flashlights you can charge by shaking them. But M2E says they’ve refined this application of the Faraday Principle to the point where it can be packed into a small size and still offer impressive amounts of power – perhaps one hour of talk time for six hours of movement.

GigaOM covers some of the implications of this for areas with unreliable power grids, but it could well prove useful for web workers too. With devices like the iPhone 3G getting increasingly hungry for power, the thought of a backup battery solution that you could just toss into your computer and forget about is pretty attractive – especially if it would charge the best when you were on the run and most likely to be away from your regular charger.