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Hands-on with Hi-Tech Wealth's solar powered S116
We had the opportunity to check out HTW Electronics' S116 at CeBIT, and good golly, it's real! For an estimated 400 to 500 dollars, this solar powered device can be yours as early as next month -- that is, if you live in China -- and potentially late fall in Europe. Sadly, we were told that this self-charging flip is currently only available in dual band GSM 900 / 1800 flavor, so eco-friendly users on this side of the world will have to wait. The 1.3 megapixel shooter doesn't do much for us, but hey, the standby time of... uh, forever is pretty dang nifty. A small LCD panel on the phone's face gives you info like time, battery charge status and handset volume. Leaving it out in daylight for one hour is enough for the large solar panel to juice up 30 minutes of talk time, and letting it bake for 12 hours will get you a full charge. This is the only the first solar effort by HTW, and we seriously hope to see more -- maybe with an emergency hand crank built in for those not so sunny days. Solar powered S116
