Cycle clips
There’s a rubber seat which clips onto the handlebar with a couple of stretchy rubber straps which hold your mobile in place while it’s charging. These worked particularly well – easy to stretch around the phone with no buckles to fiddle with and easy to adjust too. They seemed tight enough with several different Nokias that it tried too, from a slimline C5 to a chunkier E71 with Qwerty keyboard.
Better hope it doesn't rain
Though Nokia assured me that the charger should work with any phone with a compatible port, I couldn’t get it to work with the new C5, though with my trusty E71, now a few years old, it seemed to work fine.
If you cycle like a granny, this may not be the best charger for you. The manual says you’ll need to get up to at least 6kph to get it working, but I found it was more like double that to get it started, though once it was working I could bring it down to considerably sub-Lance Armstrong levels (namely, walking pace) and it kept charging.
Once it got going it seemed to work much like a standard charger, and the power bars on the screen ran upwards in the usual way to show that it was indeed putting some juice into my phone’s battery.
Ten minutes pedalling was enough to put another bar on the charge meter, which gave cause for rejoicing. But after a further half hour of near constant pedalling (OK, pedalling and free-wheeling, but the wheels were going round for almost all that time), there was still no sign of another bar. The impression was that you’ll need to do a fair bit of leg work to keep your phone fully charged.
Tyred technology?
Verdict
It’s kind of old school technology but it does at least work, and offers a green alternative to cutting down on your emissions and, indeed, the number of chargers you have sitting around the house. But you’ll need to do quite a bit of pedalling to make it worthwhile, so it’s probably only worth considering if you have a lengthy commute to work or plan to use it on an extended cycling trip to the wilds, if you can get a signal that is. ®
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COMMENTS
The '70s called....
....they'd like their "technology" back, please.
GJC
Not designed for western markets
It's for developing countries where there might not be a reliable electricity charge but they are more likely to have a bike. (It's a lot cheaper in those markets)
They just sold it here as a pander to greenies.
re: destroyed the sidewall
If it was dragging and wearing then you didn't set it up correctly. or the dynamo bearings were knackered.
Better green solution...
Don't buy a new phone until your old one is unusable. Wasting money on the new, annual release of the next iToy fashion accessory is bad for the environment. And no, you aren't going to watch the latest blockbuster on an iPhone. You are just wasting the environment to show off. Given how much we know about the environmental effects of conspicuous consumption, that sits at the pathetic end of the spectrum of human behaviour.
The tech industry is one of the worst offenders for built-in obsolesence, landfill and waste. Tech owners and early adopters are some of the most arrogant when it comes to not giving a stuff about the environment that their kids will inherit.
Probably good for the economy that the concept of shame has passed out of currency, given the sheer laziness and ignorance of those who continue to unthinkingly pollute at the drop of a hat, and the complete dependency upon consumer addiction of our flawed and unsustainable economic system
It will end badly, but you needn't worry, eh. It's your kids and grandchildren that will suffer the most, not you.
Not all about the money
I'm not sure why you'd assume this would just be about the money. It seems to be most useful as a way of ensuring your phone can be used as a GPS nav unit for more than a couple of hours whilst out cycling (using ovi maps of course). Given it's use of a rim dynamo, I can't see it appealing to anybody other than leisure cyclists, but that seems to be a legitimate market. More serious outdoors types would probably have a dedicated weatherproof GPS unit anyway. I'd have thought the largest problem for this use would be the rubber straps to hold the phone in place though, since they go right across the screen.
