Re: solar charging for your electronics
We've used a few of them in the field when power was not an option, but we've found that unless you have really nice bright sunny conditions even larger units provide very little power. If you read the reviews on most of the smaller units say at REI etc. you find the constant theme is most of them won't power or charge a device in any reasonable amount of time. What good is a solar charger that takes 2 days to charge an ipod? Granted if you are backpacking for 2 weeks it may be the only viable option but most people are very disappointed in them for everyday type of use.
I have the brunton 26watt fold-able solar charger mentioned above, and if it's not sunny out it won't charge or power something as simple as an ipod with any efficiency. In full sun it puts out pretty impressive power, but in anything less it's just worthless.
What you might look into is either having a couple spare phone batteries, or perhaps some of the external batteries (some have solar charging options as well), you can get a 4000+ mah USB units pretty cheap now that's not much bigger than the phone itself.
There are also several options for USB type chargers that take AA batteries, and you can just plug your phone into that and keep a bunch of spare AA's. Similar to what Here2Learn posted, I've seen 4 AA versions under $10 on ebay. I always have a couple of them floating around in case they are needed. Very handy and cost effective.
