The 21st century is an innovative era in terms of science and technology from the initial stage. It’s not just about the discovery of a novel tool but also the revival of the pre-existing technology. In the past few years technology has witnessed a trend in it's developing and evolving gadgets. There is always something exciting about out of the blue ideas which may seem a bit hogwash at first but the practical use eventually settles it.

Researchers at the University of Washington (UW) have invented the phone in June 2017 which does not require a battery. The owner of Smartphone or any phone starts fretting as soon as they see the top right-hand bar decreasing and this invention can be a boon to everyone who relentlessly complains of their battery issues in their phones.

The prototype cell phone is the result of the years of innovating and developing by Talla, a research associate at the lab of Joshua Smith, who researches computer science and electrical engineering at UW. He saw this vision of a phone functioning not with battery but relying only on the ambient energy (the process of obtaining the energy with the help of man-made sources which is found in the everyday environment).

Initial stage

At first when you will take a glance at this device you will see it is not like your regular phones it is actually a keypad reduced to a circuit board that means it does not have any screen as such, it is just an abstract concept of a phone and for now it just performs the basic function of a phone. This device takes advantage of tiny vibrations in a phone’s microphone or speaker that occur when a person is talking into a phone or listening to a call.

An antenna connected to that device converts that activity into changes in standard analog radio signal emitted by a cellular base station. This process essentially encodes speech patterns in reflected radio signals in a way that uses almost no power. To broadcast speech, the phone uses vibrations from the device’s microphone to encode speech patterns in the

reflected signals. To receive speech, it converts encoded radio signals into sound vibrations that that are picked up by the phone’s speaker. In the prototype device, the user presses a button to switch between these two “transmitting” and “listening” modes.

The team designed the custom base station to transmit and receive the radio signals. But that technology possibly could be integrated into standard cellular network infrastructure or Wi-Fi routers now commonly used to make calls.

“You could imagine in the future that all cell towers or Wi-Fi routers could come with our base station technology embedded in it,” said co-author Vamsi Talla, “And if every house has a Wi-Fi router in it, you could get battery-free cell phone coverage everywhere.”

“We’ve built what we believe is the first functioning cellphone that consumes almost zero power,” said co-author Shyam Gollakota, an associate professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the UW.

“To achieve the really, really low power consumption that you need to run a phone by harvesting energy from the environment, we had to fundamentally rethink how these devices are designed.”

“To achieve the really, really low power consumption that you need to run a phone by harvesting energy from the environment, we had to fundamentally rethink how these devices are designed.”

Work in progress

The question now is that how do you make a phone will not rely on the direct power source? You make sure that the device doesn’t feed off a lot of energy. This little device takes 3.5 microwatts, the phone has a basic touch-sensitive number pad and it its only display is a tiny red LED that glows momentarily when a key is pressed. A hefty touch screen would require around 400 milliwatts—over one hundred thousand times as much as power as Talla's phone currently needs.

Besides this, the voice calls are really awkward. You have to press a button, walky-talky style to switch between listening and talking and sustaining a conversation in the midst of the static is not an easy task.

Talla promises enhanced call quality and an E-link display for sending text messages for the next generation device and sometime later the user can snap selfies too.

According to the UW, the research team planned to focus on the device’s operating range and encrypting conversations to make them secure.

It lacks a captivating look or the trendy developments like your phones but it does come with a silver lining that soon you will forget that you have forgotten your charger at home and the reasonable cost of this device will be of prime importance for users. You can always be enrolled with the latest gadgets but this is something beyond those recurring devices. This one’s going to a big savior.

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