Cellphones ought to be ideal for making emergency calls during a power cut, but if the battery runs flat, you’re stuck. Now Taiwan’s Institute for Information Industry suggests that linking several cellphones will muster enough battery power to make a call (US 2003/0157974).
The idea exploits a feature that all cellphones share: they shut down before they lose all power. This avoids irreversible chemical changes ruining the battery. The institute wants all future cellphone batteries to have an extra pair of standard-sized electrical contacts which will allow them to be linked in an emergency and it has designed a connector to do the job.…
