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As the Earth’s population gets more and more obsessed with making friends with trees, being nicer to clouds and refraining from weeing in rivers, the consumer electronics industry has been making some shrub-friendly innovations. So many in fact, our good friends at SmartPlanet have built an entire Web site dedicated to talking about such objects of dreadlockian desire.
One of our favourite hippy-friendly devices is the Baylis Eco Media Player — an MP3 player that’s powered with pure-grade elbow grease. But Roberts Radio knows something more powerful than the human arm: a little thing called the Sun.
And that’s what’s going to be powering its new solarDAB digital radio — apparently a world first for a DAB set.
An integrated solar panel on the top of the radio absorbs sunlight, recharging the internal battery. When fully charged, the solarDAB will run for 27 hours without contact with the Sun. After that, if the Sun’s got his hat on around the other side of the planet, the radio can be powered from a mains adaptor.
In addition to its single speaker, it’s got a line-in socket for jacking in iPods and whatnot, a small backlit LCD display and a stereo headphone socket.
We’ll be very keen to see how well a radio such as this runs from solar power, so we’re hoping to bring you a review as soon as possible. For those already keen to get some photon-powered Archers episodes, the solarDAB is on sale now for £80 in a range of colours. -Nate Lanxon
