Solar power combined with fancy-looking cases? The perfect storm for getting an end-of-the-week mention on the Gadget Lab. Today its the turn of the Novothink Solar Surge, an iPhone and iPad Touch case with a solar panel and a lithium-ion polymer battery. Instead of just gluing some photo-sensitive panels to the back of a case, Novothink has, well, actually thought about the design.

In sunlight, the case can grab enough juice in a half-hour two-hours for 30 minutes talk time on 3G and an hour on 2G. That's enough to make this case useful on its own, especially as outdoors is exactly the place you can't plug in a charger. The case also has a hole for hooking onto a carabiner and hanging from a backpack – a bad idea in the city, but out in the wilderness and away from pickpockets it is ideal.

For once, the iPod Touch gets some extra love: The Touch version of the case, due to the extra space afforded by the iPod's slim body, has a 1500mAH battery (the iPhone's is 1320mAH). Both cases, when fully charged, will double the life of the devices. There's even a free iPhone app to help you calculate how much sunbathing your case has to do to get you through a day. Other neat touches are the row of LEDs to tell you how much power is left and, on the inevitable cloudy days, the regular USB socket in the case means you can charge (and sync) without Apple's custom cord.

The Apple-certified cases aren't cheap, but for such utilitarian devices they certainly look good. The iPod Touch case is $70 (on offer right now at $53) and the iPhone version costs $80.

Surge for iPod Touch [Novothink. Thanks, Matt!]

Surge for iPhone [Novothink]

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