What a good idea! Saves on batteries, save on the earth and use energy efficiently, I like it!

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Well it should have some sort of battery it charges for when you are not in the sun.

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great for people on wheels who don’t get much of time for charging. good for people on beach too. Not good for me. and definitely not good for miners. Might be good for tarzan, he need new technologies in the wild. lol.

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Never heard of that brand before but looks cute.I think it’ll be worth a try.$96 is too much though.

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Good invention but I don’t think someone ‘normal’ will use this mp4-player. Normaly your mp3/4-player is in your pocket and you will not turn you to the sun (if there is sun).

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Excellent.  Now they just need to put this technology into a device that doesn’t suck.

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Apple just recently filed for a patent for solar panels on devices such as iPods and their Macbooks… however I am sure they are going to implement it much better than the Thanko Solar MP4 Player, which has such poor battery life that it barely makes it useable

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This looks pretty sweet,
I think the solar panels could work really well if they continuously (except at night) charge the batteries.

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According to Thanko, an hour of charging under direct sunlight will yield enough juice for 35 minutes of audio or 15 minutes of video. This isn’t the first green PMP device around, and I’m sure it definitely won’t be the last.

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If they can get it up to 1:1 and run the device purely off the solar panel, that would be a major improvement, and also wouldn’t slowly kill your batteries through continuous charging/discharging as long as the sun is out.

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Green is the way to go. This device appears to need a little bigger solar panel to make play time longer. I’m sure later devices will be more efficient.

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Great for people on the go, and powered by the sun, although I wish that you could get more video time out of it maybe 15 minute more. Even if its cloudy you can charge it up with the usb cord. Good for the environment. I like all what it has to offer.

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@buckeye yeah 15 minutes is not much play time considering how long you have to charge it for, plus the fact that thats probably in constant full light
very good effort but i think apple will put their solar panels to better use

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This is what I’d like to see in every MP3 Player!  This feature saves a lot of power usage.  With the summer coming I could easily keep recharging my MP3 player just by using solar energy.

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