Music Fans in UK This Weekend Treated to Pedal-Power For Their Phones

The only real problem with today’s portable electronics is battery life. The gear gets more powerful but sadly battery technology really hasn’t kept up, that’s why we write about things like solar power. But there are also nifty things called dynamos, devices you pump or crank to juice up your batteries. O2, a large mobile carrier in the UK, will be installing bicycle-powered dynamos around a festival it’s sponsoring this coming weekend to charge up music fans’ mobiles. Sure, they could have run power cables and created power stations, but where’s the fun in that? And as anyone who’s been to a large outdoor festival in the last few years knows, you’re going to want to power up at least once a day or else you’re cut off. And if you’ve got our luck, it’d be right before Winehouse takes the stage, so you’d have no bawdy SMS session to distract you. [Pocket Picks]