How To Make Sure You Can Charge Your Cell Phone In An Emergency, Part II.

I wrote a while back about how to charge a cell phone in an emergency, and some new information has come to light which is somewhat disturbing in a way, but I would be hard pressed to say that I didn't expect it.

The problem Graham Knight has been telling me about is that people in the developing world are having problems charging the newer cell phones. I'd never seen it before until I started looking. It's real. And it's a big problem for charging a cell phone in areas where even having a cell phone is somewhat of a novelty still.

Proprietary Batteries Pose Problems For Charging

Graham Knight, of DIY Solar Electricity, sent me the link a while back but I was too busy with other things to give it my full attention. One of the things that Graham sent out was an excerpt from 'Motorola Announces Availability of New Wireless Phone Batteries for Increased Performance and Safety, Featuring New Hologram Design':

Counterfeit batteries can be used to power on a Motorola cellular phone but because they lack the unique Motorola verification information, they can not be charged properly with Motorola products.

When the counterfeit battery is attached to the Motorola phone, the phone's display will read "invalid battery"
and it will emit an audio alert or the battery icon on the phone display will not flash indicating to the user that their battery cannot be charged.

When the battery is placed into a Motorola desktop charger, the charger will blink its red LED light indicating that the battery is not charging.

Earlier in the same article, they talk about the use of EPROMs in the batteries. That article was written in July of 1998 - a bit over 7 years ago. Did they pursue it? It would seem that they have.

Graham also pointed to Techdirt's 'NEC Creates System For Blocking Counterfeit Batteries'- published last year.

Seems like while I wasn't using a mobile phone, all sorts of weird things were happening.

The Reality of Proprietary Batteries

Apparently, a lot of the creation of proprietary batteries is attributed to protecting the consumer from exploding batteries. But is it? It seems to me that if it were about protecting the consumer, the batteries themselves wouldn't be called 'counterfeit' but 'substandard'.

A battery is a battery is a battery. There are different kinds of batteries, but 'Not Just Nokia Phones That Explode'. And Nokia phones were blowing up with the original battery.

Counterfeit? Invalid? Come on, it's a battery. If exploding batteries were a safety issue, there should be better regulation on battery manufacture and importation - not special batteries that can only be charged by certain company's exclusive chargers. But in the world where people can not only afford to get the chargers - and more importantly, walk into a store where they can get it. I'm betting that in obscure villages in Africa, Motorola and Nokia don't have little stores there.

This might be said to be about marketshare, but it doesn't make sense from that angle - it defies logical thought. It also defies solar charging, for the most part.

Can We Change Things?

Probably not. First of all, not enough people with mobile phones seem to care about charging their phone with solar electricity, and the remote villages around the world aren't cash cows to the corporations. It's a rather sad state of affairs when the people who have access and the money to proprietary charging technology don't care too awful much about others who don't. Nothing new, really. It keeps the marketers employed, I suppose. And we need those marketers to sell stuff that doesn't work with anything else. Sort of reminds me of software licensing.

It's not the end of the world though. That's not scheduled until a Thursday.

Reckless Experimentation

My new Nokia doesn't charge through a solar panel attached to the phone itself - a 5-6 Volt output solar panel. But if I pull the battery out, I can charge the battery itself with no problem.

I picked up a car adapter for it, since the car adapter works directly off of DC. Running the car adapter to the 12V solar system I have, it charged the phone. Why? The charger has their circuit in it (and I ripped one apart to check it out).

But all phones are different. The ultimate answer, so far, is charging the battery outside of the phone for solar applications - or adapting a car adapter to use solar energy. But corporations don't want that, they want us to buy more batteries and chargers. That's good business for them. But it's impractical in quite a few places that the corporations don't care about.

So this is a problem that needs to be solved. The easiest thing found so far is that the batteries can be charged by solar energy - if they are taken out of the phone. But that depends on the phone, the manufacturer, and so forth.

I'll keep experimenting... and if you have ideas on how to help solve this problem, drop a note below. Meanwhile, start really thinking about what would happen to you if a hurricane such as Katrina blew through your town, and all you had was a cell phone - no electricity. And you need help. And you can't get it, because you can't figure out how to charge your battery.