What Could be Better than the iPhone?

Since I got my iPhone last month, which I cherish, it is the ultimate item for the gadget lover. But it failed to win Popular Science magazine top Innovation of the Year 2007. (check this link out for lots of pics and more background information). Ranked overall winner was a product by a company called Nanosolar.

Nanosolar, after five years of product development – including aggressively pipelined science, research and development, manufacturing process development, product testing, manufacturing engineering and tool development, and factory construction have just began shipping their first solar panels. You may ask why this is an exciting development, and why their product is sold out for 12 months.

Their product is defining by being:

• the world’s first printed thin-film solar cell in a commercial panel product;
• the world’s first thin-film solar cell with a low-cost back-contact capability;
• the world’s lowest-cost solar panel – which we believe will make us the first solar manufacturer capable of profitably selling solar panels at as little as $.99/Watt;
• the world’s highest-current thin-film solar panel – delivering five times the current of any other thin-film panel on the market today and thus simplifying system deployment;
• an intensely systems-optimized product with the lowest balance-of-system cost of any thin-film panel – due to innovations in design we have included.

A truely exciting development in the world of renewable energy technology, Nanosolar have been developing this technology for years and have attracted some high profile investors too, none other than the Google founders Larry Page and Sergay Brin in the early days. I just can't wait to get my hands on all the solar power I can afford and set up my own solar farm on my roof.