FreshPhoneNews.com

Intel is going very green. The company had just recently announced that it is currently focusing its research on using free energy as a source of mobile power. The free energy will come from the devices’ environment, drawing power from body heat, sunlight, etc.

It seems that there are already prototype smartphones which have touch screens that double as solar cells. Intel also wants to harvest the energy the mobile phone user generates while moving the trackball. Cell phone radiation or TV signals are another energy option.

The main itch is to have an infinite source of energy that costs noting either to the user or to the environment. The company is planning on building special sensors that will continuously scavenge for energy sources without any input from the user. This will pretty much eliminate the use of batteries or chargers.

“These become … install-and-forget systems, because they can scavenge energy from the environment and power themselves up,” said Justin Rattner, the Chief Technology Officer.

The project is still in its infancy but the idea is pretty attractive; living in a world where we never have to worry about charging our PDAs, mobile phones, MP3s, etc. sounds very next generation and Star Trek-ish doesn’t it?

AOL just launched this Thursday a brand new sync application that will sync the users AOL address book and calendar with Outlook and their mobile phone. The application, AOL Sync, is the result of a partnership between AOL and Plaxo, all to bring you a Funambol based, bidirectional, over-the-air client. Funambol, in case you don’t know, is a popular open source synchronization solution that uses SyncML to push PIM data to mobile devices and desktop applications. In spirit, it’s the poor man’s Exchange / BES.

The AOL sync client supports Outlook, Outlook Express and both Windows Mobile phones and BlackBerry handsets. you can install the client to either your phone or desktop, configure it to sync with the AOL servers and before you can wonder what happened, automatic OTA bidirectional syncing. Sweet! Though they haven’t listed them as supported devices, there is a Funambol sync client for the iPhone and for Thunderbird / Sunbird (experimental) as well. If you can get the AOL settings, it may be worth a try to see if those other platforms work, too. 

Now let’s wait till users have actually tried the new application out to see if AOL has lived up to its claims.