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Tech

This Solar-Powered Public Phone Box Charges Your Smartphone for Free

A London project adapts the city's iconic phone boxes into solar charging stations.
All images: Solarbox

There's little use for the UK's iconic red phone boxes in the age of the iPhone, but this green one might come in handy. Unveiled in London this week, the "solarbox" adapts a traditional phone box into a free charging station for mobile devices, powered by a solar panel on its roof.

Battery life remains the biggest bug-bear of consumer tech. Sure, your fancy smartphone can do all sorts of fun tricks, but keep it running those apps full-pelt and it'll soon turn into little more than a shiny brick. Probably just at the moment you realise you're lost and need to make a phone call, if my experience is anything to go by.

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As long as consumer electronics aren't generating their own power, this kind of public project is a tempting solution to what's admittedly a first-world problem.

"It was born out of our interest for public space and London's green agenda," Solarbox cofounder Harold Craston told me over my conventionally-charged phone. "In second year [of university at London School of Economics] I lived next to a phone box and walked past it every day, and thought we must have a use for these—there's 8,000 of them."

It's a pretty simple idea: Inside the box, painted lurid green, there are a selection of chargers to fit most smartphones. It's completely off-grid, with the 150 watt flexible solar panel harvesting energy and storing it in an integrated battery.

Craston and cofounder Kirsty Kenney assured me it would have enough juice to keep going in the evenings and over the winter. "We need about three hours of sunlight a day to get enough energy to run this system," said Kenney.

The time it takes to charge your phone depends on the make, model, and number of apps you have open. For an iPhone in airplane mode, the team said it would take five to 10 minutes to get 20 percent charge. The box is intended for those emergency moments when your battery's flat and you just need enough to make a call, or for passers-by who want to grab the opportunity to add another bar of power.

Perhaps the most cunning part of the Solarbox project, however, has nothing to do with charging: They've found another way to offer a free tech service in return for advertising. A shatterproof screen shows ads while users charge their phones. About 70 percent of the ads will be for companies like Tinder and Uber and 30 percent of them will be community ads for local music performances and the like, he said.

The first box, located on the city centre's busy Tottenham Court Road, was funded by awards including the runner-up prize in the Mayor of London's Low Carbon Entrepreneur of the Year Award, and Craston and Kenney told me that 85 people used the charging station on its first day, most of whom were 18 to 30-year-olds. They hope to get six more in the city and are looking for funding.

The only catch for users is the potential vulnerability of flashing your fancy phone around in a public space, and the Solarbox website states that "Users charge their phones at their own risk."

And to deter vandals (and drunk people pissing in the phone box), it's only open from 5.30am to 11.30pm—so you'll have to find somewhere else to make that late-night booty call long after your mobile's retired to sleep.