Can you use cell phones to make popcorn? Sure -- if you believe the three vids below.
But in my mind, there's no doubt it's all a hoax, a remarkably good one, too. For one thing, cell phones don't have the power to do it (read some decent arguments). It's also not a magic trick (I've been in that business long enough to spot an illusion.)
More likely, it's someone with tremendous video editing skills out to have some fun. (Remember the UFO hoax? Watch the video here.)
The most striking thing that makes me think it's a put on is that each of the three videos have a similar stagey look and feel with three or four people sitting around a table. The table's adorned with an assortment of props and the walls have the same off-white, creamy color. The camera's jerky style is the same. To add authenticity, each is in a different language and supposedly in a different country.
BTW, Snopes calls it a hoax, but they don't offer an explanation.
So what do you think? Real or hoax -- and why?
Even the very early analog cell phones like the old "Brick" were less than 5 watts, and did not operate in a frequency range anywhere neat that of microwave ovens (although technically they used microwave frequencies).
Modern mobile phones operate nominally in the same range as microwave ovens, but their power is incredibly less -- usually less than one watt. They would need to be roughly 50,000% more powerful to pop corn, even working together.
Even a GREAT editor would have a VERY difficult time, short of using some digital effects editing to match the frames so that the motion wouldn't look jerky. The most likely explanation is some type of inductive heat, under the cloth or directly under the table. In the first video, it could easily be a small piece of tin with a current underneath the cloth. The second video with the Asian people, look at the table they are at. There is a thin top, with a cloth in between the top and the base. Hmm, might be a great place to put a heating element under.
If you had to give an award in this category, it would definitely go to the third groups video. You never see the side of the table, only the top, and at least they were smart enough to have more than ONE person calling THREE phones! Most people barely know how to make a 3-way call on their phone, and unless there's newer technology out there, well, I've not seem a 4-way call feature.
Where does one begin :)
Tto heat the ~250 uL of water in one kernel to boiling point (which is what causes the kernel to pop) would require ~ 85 J of energy input. Assuming the kernel of corn was receiving the full power from even three phones, it would take ~ 50 sec to boil the 250 uL of water.
As a consequence of the long microwave wavelength (~ 12 cm) and the size of popcorn kernels (~0.5 cm), microwave popcorn packets need to have a foil liner in their base to make the corn pop. It is actually the foil liner that is heated by the microwaves, and which subsequently pops the corn, not the corn kernels themselves.
CARDOSYSTEMS made these vids. YES It?s Fake!!! I found their vids posted yesterday on youtube: www.youtube.com/user/CardoWireless
"Even a GREAT editor would have a VERY difficult time, short of using some digital effects editing to match the frames so that the motion wouldn't look jerky."
Actually, quite the reverse. A jerky video lends exactly the kind of authenticity that makes it look so real, and "doing it jerky" is a million times harder than "doing it steady". And yes, a great video editor, using even greater tools (say, After Effects), needs every bit of their skill to properly motion-track the jerky source video so that the kernels won't "float" all over the place. The first time such motion tracking was made famous was in Jurassic Park, were we see dinosaurs in a field from the POV of a bouncy jeep.
This could be done eaily. As you can see, all the popcorn pops up out of screen, this is the digitally composited one.They make it happen so fast no one can tell. They then can get the camera person to just throw real popcorn down into shot. As for removing the old kernels, I'd say this could be done with an old digital compositing trick called rotoscoping. Where you paint things in or out frame by frame. Not as hard as it sounds because it's only a little piece of corn really. And because your have a pretty flat coloured table cloth or table top there. You could probably even do this in your mobile phone video editing software!
To echo miblaker18 - They are definitely all hoaxes - all three made by Cardosystems to sell their hands free devices.
http://www.cardosystems.com/pop/
They even have a disclaimer that says it is an optical illusion and that nothing in the video is to imply that cell phones actually make popcorn.