How do you cut down on your energy consumption whilst your using your mobile phone, that is the question manufacturers and designers are asking themselves, powering the handset in an earth friendly way yet making it a green mobile phone has become the holy grail of the industry.

Their are solar mobiles, wind powered, wind up kinetic versions, even Yoyo powered mobiles. So what other creative ways can be developed to power your mobile? Well some Korean scientists have come up with a novel idea… They have developed a way of charging your mobile by using the power of speech, making voice calls maybe the key to a longer battery life in your mobile phone.

Scientists Young Jun Park and Sang-Woo Kim have developed a nano-based piezoelectric material that is capable of converting sound waves into electricity. I’m sure Edison got the same looks when he came up with some of his ideas, but then he did get it right most of the time.

Developed from wait for it…Calamine lotion, they hope to be able to reverse the process of sound into electricity and convert the electrical signals into sound.

Just as speakers transform electric signals into sound, this is the opposite process — of turning sound into a source of electrical power. Sound power can be used for various novel applications including mobile phones that could be charged whilst having a conversation.

Anyhow, Young and Sang-Woo have created a field of nanowires using two electrodes. When the device was blasted with sound waves, they generated a mild electrical current of about 50 millivolts. Which is very low to what you actually need to charge a mobile phone, but it’s on its way.