Nokia certainly have been at the forefront of developing the use of renewable energy sources within their handsets, some ideas have been crazy (some of the best ones) and some like the Nokia Solar Charging Project (TNSCP) are really looking to gain an insight into just how are we going to cut down our CO2 emissions, the true value and use of solar power technology whilst we use our mobile phones.

Over the next three months, the TNSCP project will look at the real world effectiveness of solar technology by learning just how the test mobile phones harvest solar energy, in a variety of locations around the globe – from the Arctic Circle in Finnish Lapland to Kenya, from Sweden and the Baltic Sea.

With over 5 billion mobile phones on the planet, that’s a lot of resource use, a lot of power generated and an awful lot of CO2 pumped up in the sky, the days of free sky pollution where you can just pump anything up into the atmosphere are fast coming to an end.

So to find out just what can be done, Nokia have installed a black box inside a Nokia C1-02, it has a solar panel integrated into its design and it’s called ‘Lokki’. The box is there to record just how much sun the phones receive throughout the test between now and September.

Who has them? A security officer in Kenya, working in Nairobi, a 16 year old girl in scout camp in Sweden and research technician working in the Artic Circle will be using the devices as per their day.

It’s a unique project, in that we will get a real view of the differing power challenges that are faced by people trying to live a green lifestyle around the world. And out of it, well with such hard facts as these, we are likely to see some radical changes in mobile phone design over the coming years, that could really make a difference.

If you want to keep abreast of how it’s going, check out…http://solarcharging.nokia.com