The age of smart chargers

Many of us, me included, are guilty of leaving the chargers for our various handheld gadgets plugged into the wall all the time, where they constantly draw a few wasted watts and feel warm to the touch. These "wall warts" or "vampires" are easy to corral if you simply put them all in one place on one on/off power strip and then keep the strip off until you need to recharge, but setting that up just seems so utterly exhausting!

Maybe it's time for the chargers themselves to get smarter, to turn themselves on and off as needed and to monitor the gadgets they're recharging so they know when a full charge has been accomplished.

As you might expect, it's a cell phone manufacturer that's trying to make this happen. Nokia, which has a pretty good record at pursuing green solutions, is toying with such smart charger.

NokNok, a blog that specializes in Nokia news, has a report and an exclusive video that shows Nokia's "zero-waste" charger in action. "This prototype has a big green button that you simply press to activate the phone to charge. [Nokia's Head of Design Strategic Projects Rhys Newman] also explains that it could be that your Nokia phone communicates with the charger, telling it when it's fully charged, switching it off at the source automatically. Similarly, he speaks of options where the charger could be set to just top-up your phone with a set amount of power."

And while we wait for these developments to come to market, unplug those wall warts!