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Nokia's €15 bicycle cellphone charger, now €30 in Europe
Last we heard, Nokia's bike-powered cellphone charger was set to roll out worldwide by the end of 2010 for about €15 -- now the company's peddling it for €30 to European velocipede enthusiasts. (Sure, it's twice as expensive as we anticipated, but it's a huge step up from this thing.) The kit, intended primarily for developing markets, comes with a Nokia charger, phone holder, and bottle dynamo: the thing that spins your pedal pushing into cellphone juice. Aside from price and availability, Nokia seems to have followed through on the rest of its promises -- it sports a 2-mm charger interface and provides 28 minutes of talk time for every 10 minutes spent riding between 6kph (4mph) and 50kph (31mph). European riders can pick up the charger kit from Nokia's online store, while the rest of us just keep spinning our wheels.
Nokia's €15 bike charger will abide
We've been seeing dynamo-powered gadget bicycle chargers for, well, ever. But it's good to see a company with the global reach of Nokia getting into the action with a €15ish kit all its own. Nokia says that a 10 minute bike ride at 6mph (10kph) will produce enough power for 28 minutes of talk time or 37 hours of standby. The kit, primarily intended for developing markets, ships globally before the end of the year with a handlebar mount, dynamo, and 2-mm charger jack. But there's nothing stopping you from picking up a micro USB adapter (at your own cost) and using the charger with Nokia's smarter (and more power hungry) handsets like the N97, N900 and forthcoming N8** -- any micro USB handset really, regardless of vendor. Coupled with Nokia's free turn-by-turn guided Ovi Maps, the kit could be quit handy when navigating the countryside on a long weekend bike ride, or for navigating within cities, like, oh we don't know, Amsterdam. ** Nokia N8 can be charged over 2mm or micro USB connectors, fancy.
