Skip to main content

Flexible solar panel straps to outdoor fans’ backpacks to create mobile charger

SunnyBAG LEAF+ Kickstarter Video
The new iPhone 7 and 7 Plus may boast Apple’s best-ever smartphone batteries, but there’s no getting around the fact that keeping your mobile devices charged 24/7 remains a big challenge.

That challenge becomes even more important if you’re the kind of active person who relies on your smartphone or another gadget when climbing a mountain, or carrying out some other equally  impressive physical task that doesn’t provide very many opportunities to charge your phone.

A new Kickstarter project aims to solve that problem with a 6-watt flexible solar panel that weighs less than 200 grams and can be strapped right onto your backpack. The so-called SunnyBag LEAF+ offers the world’s lightest flexible outdoor solar system — making it perfect for keeping everything from your smartphone to your digital camera properly juiced when you’re on the go.

“We’ve always been interested in creating environmentally friendly solutions for the mobile energy supply problem,” Stefan Ponsold, SunnyBag’s founder, told Digital Trends. “That’s been our vision since day one.”

The company’s mission began four years ago, when Ponsold was approached by the organization Doctors Without Borders to create an easily portable solar charging system. “They needed something lightweight and robust …,” he recalled. “As a result, we came up with the first LEAF prototype product. The response was so positive that at the end of 2013, we rolled it out into the market place.”

Plenty of satisfied feedback later, and SunnyBag is now back with that product’s direct sequel: the LEAF+.

“We stuck with the same design, the same size, the same weight, but improved the efficiency of the solar system,” Ponsold said. “Already, there had been a lot new technologies since two years ago. We had to decide whether we’d use high-efficient monocrystalline cells, or stick with the flexible technology we had been using. In the end, we decided we didn’t want A or B, we wanted A and B in one product. We decided to put highly efficient, monocrystalline “sunpower” solar cells with an efficiency of 22.4 percent on the top and the bottom of the device. They’re not flexible but they have a very high output. Then in the middle part, which is the bit that bends if you put it on top of your backpack, we chose to stick with a slightly improved version of the flexible panel we’d used before.”

If you’re interested in getting hold of a unit, you can do so for a pledge of just 74 euros ($83 U.S.), which includes a 4.000mAh PowerBank. Ponsold said the product will suit anyone who’s regularly pursues outdoor activities for more than 2 or 3 hours at a time. “If you’re not going to be near a power plug, this is for you,” he concluded.

Well, that covers our ‘Pokémon Go’ habit — err, we mean our extreme mountain-climbing hobby.

Editors' Recommendations

Luke Dormehl
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more