The US Patent and Trademark Office recently published a bunch of ten newly granted patents that are in favor of Steve Job’s Apple Inc., where the most notable one would be Apple’s first solar powered portable device patent. Don’t get all your panties up in a bunch just yet – you won’t be seeing any solar-powered iPhones anytime soon, but who are we to say that such a handset will not hit the market in its 10th iteration? This patent will touch virtually all portables from MacBooks to the iPhone, of course, where it allows the inclusion of solar power into the power mix of portables thanks to a voltage converter. Solar-power is certainly gaining traction among portable electronics (Samsung gave out a solar-powered device charger at CES this year during their press conference, while solar-powered Bluetooth headsets have long been around), but until the efficiency of solar cells increase by a large margin, you won’t get exclusively solar-powered phones just yet.
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