Hungry for power: Juiced up gadgets

Tired of having your laptop or cell phone run out of juice after a few hours? Well, new tiny fuel cells powered by combustibles could be the eventual solution by keeping a device going for days and days instead of hours!

Fuel cells let a tiny amount of liquid or gas into a small chip to generate electricity without combustion. It pretty much allows you to skip the wall plug altogether and just swap out a fuel cartridge to continue using your device for longer periods of time.

So what's kept fuel cells from reaching the market? Companies say they are still working on making them small, cheap, long-lasting (and probably most important) making sure they don't overheat and explode.

One firm founded by former M.I.T. researchers plans to introduce a portable fuel cell late next year for any device that can be charged via a USB port.

The cigarette-pack-size charger will use a canister of butane, the same fuel used in cigarette lighters, to juice up an iPod, BlackBerry, GPS device or a digital camera. Each teaspoon of the fuel can provide 20 times the run time of a battery of the same size. The charging system would likely sell for $100 to $150 with refill cartridges retailing for $1 to $3. Another company plans to transition to embedding fuel cells in gadgets.

Panasonic is promising a fuel cell that can power a laptop for 20 hours on a cup of methanol -- but sadly the company says it won't hit stores until 2012.

Medis Technologies Ltd. has come out with a 1-watt liquid fuel cell recharger that can provide 30 hours of cell phone talk time. The "24-7 Power Pack" is slightly larger than a deck of cards and can't be refueled, so it has to be recycled once it's exhausted.

Photos: Getty Images

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Comments

[Busby SEO Test]

this stuff is the next solution for power saver, i like the concept,thanks for posting it

[Darkertomcat]

I hope they roll out with those very soon with the amount of charges I have to do daily>.<