Sun Powered Shades

Sadly very few solar powered gadgets are actually green. Hardly any of them will ever recover the energy expended in their manufacture during their working lives, let alone the couple of weeks most of them last, until the novelty has worn off, but that’s another story. No, we’re here to tell you all about a pair of sunglasses fitted with solar panels that can be used to charge an MP3 player or mobile phone. Solar cells are notoriously inefficient and your face would probably burn off long before a useful charge was achieved. I may be wrong, the designers, Hyun-Joong Kim and Kwang-Seok Jeong have used organic dye type cells, which they claim to be both cheap and efficient, but given the relatively small surface areas of the cells, and the need to face directly into the Sun to get the best charge, it all seems a bit dubious.