Soon you'll be able to steal your mate's phone battery to charge your own

Running out of phone battery is a full-on nightmare and it happens all the time – you can’t use Citymapper to work out where you are; you can’t text your mates to work out where they are and you can’t even order a pizza to eat in the abandoned building site you’re currently sitting in to make yourself feel better.

But hey, those flashing red lights may be a thing of the past. You’ll soon be able to ponce battery power off your mates’ phones just by putting them next to each other. That’s because Sony have just filed a patent that will enable battery power to actually transfer between mobiles, wirelessly.

The science, boiled down to something stupid people (me) can understand, basically involves converting energy into radio waves that jump between the two phones’ antenna systems before being converted back into energy. How that works, I have zero clue – what am I, made of science? If you have to know, you can read the full patent here.

It would be some sort of voluntary system, a bit like Bluetooth pairing – so you’d scan for other users in your immediate vicinity, and then they decide if they want to give you a bit of their precious energy or not. So no sneaking around in the tube nicking everyone’s power like some sort of battery-eating underground succubus.

Also, it’s only a patent, so there’s no real sense of when it’ll become a reality, or even if it will.

And actually, if you are currently stranded on your own in an abandoned building site in the middle of nowhere, this fantastic new technology isn’t going to make a fucking jot of difference.