Getting power for your iPhone from the sun is a great concept. In reality, most of the solar chargers take so long to actually charge using the sun that they are not very practical. A new solar charger has turned up today called the MZH-1200 from Muzach.

The device has a small 1000mAh battery inside that can charge your iPhone about half way if it is dead. It has a four LED charging indicator system and supports several iPod models as well.

Novothink has announced that its Solar Surge charging cases for the iPhone and iPod touch are finally available. It will cost you $79.95 for the iPhone 3G/3GS version and $69.95 for the iPod touch version (second gen only). They are each available only in black or white right now, but additional colors are coming soon. We just don’t know when.

It should give you between four and eight hours of talk time, or up to 20 hours of additional audio playback when the charger is fully charged, but the company says you can still expect to get between 30 and 60 minutes of talk time after two hours of exposure to direct sunlight.

If plants should ever take over the world and only Mark Walberg, M. Night Shyamalan, and I are left to stand trial for mistreatment of innocent houseplants, I will be in big trouble. I have single handedly killed tons of my plants over the years from simply not watering them.

A new design concept at Yanko Design is cool and if I could get a set of the things, my plants might have a chance. The solar power Plant Mate sticks poke into the ground and would sense the moisture levels and nutrients in the soil.

This Sustainable City Lights concept is the latest in eco-friendly lighting. Each lamp post uses solar and wind energy for itself, and will use LEDs only when people are in it’s presence. When people are not nearby, it conserves energy by emitting only a soft glow.

The Sustainable City Lights open and close like a flower bud to harvest energy. Any surplus energy is returned to the main grid to use for other things. This is a not only practical, but pretty stylish as well.

Puma has teamed up with Sagem for a sporty new mobile phone, the Puma Phone. The Puma Phone features a solar panel on the back of the handset that will charge the phones battery when you are out and about in the sun.

The phone features a 2.8 inch QVGA TFT capacitive touchscreen display with a resolution of 240 x 320 pixels, a 3.2 megapixel camera with LED flash and six times digital zoom. There’s also another forward facing camera that can be used for VGA video conferencing.

When we are on the go with our mobile devices, no one wants to run out of power. There are all sorts of gadgets on the market that are designed to keep our gadgets powered up and usable. Scosche has announced its latest portable battery pack called the solBAT II.

The device is a solar charger and back up battery with two LEDs on the top to show when it is making power from the sun and when it is charging a connected device. The charger can recharge any device that connects via USB. That means Blackberrys, iPhones, and iPods are all compatible.

Casio’s newest Baby G watch is inspired by the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day and dubbed Casio the Eco-Baby-G BGR300GR-3. Eco-Baby-G incorporates Tough Solar Technology and recharging capability that eliminates the need to change batteries.

The Eco-Baby-G BGR300GR-3 is completely green. It’s not only earth friendly, but so is its recyclable box. Available in…shades of green, the BGR300GR-3 will be available in March for $110.

Well look what we have here. When we weren’t looking, Honda has begun to operate its next generation solar hydrogen station prototype at the Los Angeles Center of Honda R&D America. The idea is that its a single, integrated unit which can be installed in any garage.

This Honda Solar Hydrogen Station is smaller than its predecessor and can produce enough hydrogen through an 8-hour overnight fill for the average daily commute (which is about 10,000 miles annually) for each fuel cell electric vehicle. Pretty handy being able to refill your vehicle overnight and you can sleep well while its filling, knowing that you are lowering CO2 emissions, since you take advantage of off-peak power rates. Daytime charging is solar power.

Everyone is trying to do their part when it comes to helping those in Haiti. The Faith Comes By Hearing group are doing something as well, but they aren’t sending food, blankets or water. They are sending 600 audible Bibles.

Each of the Bibles can broadcast scriptures in Haitian Creole to an audience of up to 300 people. Aside from those 600 Bibles, they’re also raising money to send 3,000 more solar-powered audio Bibles to Haiti.

I have seen some odd devices before that pull double duty as items that don’t seem to go together at all. One good example is this new Keystone Eco Tag solar charger that also acts as a luggage tag with an area for written information to be penciled in.

When working as a gadget charger the device can charge up a pair of AAA batteries and sports a USB connection for directly attaching gadgets for charging. The device can charge connected items in four hours of direct sunlight or with eight hours of indirect sunlight.

Oregon Scientific is no stranger to weather stations with built-in alarm clocks and such, but their latest release should please environmentalists as well since it’s solar-powered.

This one features a detachable solar panel so you can harness the sun’s rays and juice up the internal battery whether the sun is shining or not. There’s the $69 Oregon Scientific +ECO Solar Weather Clock or the $99 Oregon Scientific +ECO Solar Weather Station.

Well, we all loved Regen’s Renu solar-powered iPod dock, but this guy pictured above towers over it. It’s called the Reverb and it’s 3-feet tall, living solely to crank out 60 watts of power using the power of the sun.

This bad boy will play your music for 4.5 hours at full volume or 12 hours at a normal volume. BUT, it takes 20 hours of outdoor sun exposure (or 40 hours indoor) to get a full charge. If you are not the patient type, the Reverb can be powered using a regular electrical socket.

Sure, there are plenty of solar powered chargers to charge your gadgets, but few are as sexy or as versatile as the forthcoming Regen ReNu. The solar panel is used along with one of several optional bases. These include an iPod/iPhone dock, a sound dock with it’s own speakers, and an LED desk lamp.

The built in battery constantly stores juice even when your iPod isn’t docked, so that the ReNu can then transfer the charge into your device. It can even pull power from a wall socket if you don’t have light in your space.

Looking for a radio that both Ewoks and hippies can endorse? Here it is. The Log Radio. A wooden wonder device that looks like the escape pod that R2-D2 and C-3PO took to Tatooine. It’s from designers Solène Le Goff and Christophe Gouache.

The radio is powered by solar or wind-up. It should work for a good long time until Squirrels start living inside or your senile dad chops it in half for the fireplace.

Your choice of e-reader devices continues to grow rapidly. And now LG is showing off its Solar Cell e-Book reader. The prototype has an energy conversion efficiency of about 9.6 percent. That means that it gives you an extra day’s worth of power to continue reading on that 6-inch TFT-LCD after four to five hours in the sun.

LG is working on getting that solar cell energy conversion efficiency rate to 12% by 2010 or up to 14% by 2012. Great news for bookworms, not so great if you have to read for your homework.