Vodafone has this brilliant concept in the UK known as a “Chargebox“. It’s essentially a tiny locker you can put your mobile phone in, shove some spare change in a slot on the side, and boom, your mobile phone starts charging while you go about your daily needs around the city. Every Vodafone store has several Chargebox units installed, and now customers will be able to find their nearest Chargebox thanks to their new iPhone application.
This concept would work beautifully in New York or San Francisco, cities where operators liter the streets with their ill trained retail employees, peddling buckets of minutes to unsuspecting potential customers. The rest of the country … not so much, since the masses live and die in their car and most likely have some sort of charger shoved into a cigarette lighter socket. There’s a business model here for bars, restaurants, libraries, cafes, and most other places where people sit down for a few minutes to over an hour. With wireless charging now officially a standard, expect to see special tables that are “Qi Enabled” and let you plop your exhausted smartphone on top of to give it a little boost.
How often does your battery die while you’re out? Of course this depends on how you use your mobile phone, but on average, can you get to the end of your work day without having to panic at the flashing red battery icon on your device? If so, have you considered maybe picking up a charger that you can keep around the job? I was getting terrible battery life on my iPhone 4 with push email and notifications turned on, but now that I’ve disabled all of those features I can last about 2 days off a charge. That’s a sad way to use the Jesus Phone, but killing batteries is something I’m rather talented at.
[Via: Mobile Industry Review]