Students at the Department of Industrial Design at Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, India have attached a pocket-size wind turbine to a mobile phone. The electricity generated by the turbine when could charge a cell phone when no other power source is available, and would be especially well-suited to coastal areas where there’s, duh, lot of wind. That’s the good news. The bad news is that all this tech talk is sort of full of, well, hot air. That’s because the main point of the turbine is to “extend mobile connectivity” when electricity is not available, i.e. you’ll never again be spared again the relief of a dead cell pone battery in the hand of the yapper next to you on the bus—all he’ll have to do is stick his phone out the window at 60 m.p.h. The device, according to scientists who created the prototype, does saves a bit of energy, but not a significant amount—that’s not what it was created to do. Via ::Gizmodo ::Rediff.com [by MO]

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