Oh! Gizmo

By Evan Ackerman

We’ve been waiting (and waiting and waiting and waiting) for fuel cell technology to become commercially viable. Now Medis technology has the first generation of their portable, disposable, and relatively cheap fuel cell charger ready to juice up your gadgets, and they were showing it off at the CTIA Wireless Expo here in San Francisco.

The Medis 24-7 Power Pack is portable power system designed to keep your handheld devices operational while you are on the go. The Power Pack has enough power to drive many handheld devices when the battery is nearly depleted and it will also function as a portable charger.

The 24-7 Power Pack provides sufficient energy to provide up to 30 hours of talk time to an average mobile phone or 60-80 hours of play time for an average iPod. The power is sufficient (1 watt)) to operate, and charge, multiple times, a wide range of the standard and advanced portable electronic devices in the market today.

In its current incarnation, the power pack itself is not directly rechargeable… You use it up, and then recycle the old one (the box it comes in is also a mailing container) and buy a new one. It’s not the most efficient (or the sleekest) system, but it’s a good start. You can buy different adapter tips to charge a wide variety of gadgets, and a supplementary battery cable helps pump up the output enough to charge higher drain electronics like iPhones. Once you engage the fuel system in each cell (by squeezing the unit), you’ve got about 3 months before it goes dead on you. Un-squeezed, it’s got a shelf life of years.

The Medis Power Pack is certainly a first-gen product, but you can buy it now and put it to work for $40 for the starter kit and a bit over $20 for the replacement cells. Medis has some fairly ambitious plans for their product; in the next few years, they’re hoping to introduce replaceable fuel cartridges (as opposed to recyclable cells) as well as a system designed to provide 8 hours of power for laptops. Personally, I’m looking forward to something a bit more, um, svelte.

[ Medis Power Pack ]

By Andrew Liszewski

Fuel Cell technologies definitely hold a lot of promise, but it looks like the first devices to hit the market are probably going to only appeal to early adopters. The HydroPak from Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies can produce up to 25 watts of power with a combination of replaceable solid fuel cartridges and about a pint of water. That equals about 270 watt-hours of energy which should be enough to recharge a full size laptop about 5 times.

And while the HydroPak produces no exhaust and runs nearly silent, there are unfortunately a few downsides. For one, the half-pound replacement fuel cartridges cost about $20. According to Peter Glaskowski over at Crave, that means a single kilowatt hour from the HydroPak costs $74, where as the same kilowatt hour from a wall outlet costs 10 cents. The HydroPak’s $400 price tag isn’t that expensive, and the unit only weighs about 4 pounds, but for the same amount of money you can buy a considerably more powerful gas generator if you’re looking to use the device as a source of reliable backup power.

Finally, while the HydroPak produces no exhaust, the fuel cartridges use sodium-borohydride which is actually a mildly hazardous chemical. As the fuel is used, the byproducts of the reaction are returned to the sealed cartridge so it should be safe, but there’s always the risk of something happening, particularly in the hands of Joe-consumer. However, there always has to be a first generation of every product, and Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies hopes to have the HydroPak available to consumers sometime this year, which is an important first step.

[ HydroPak Portable Power Generator ] VIA [ Crave ]

By Evan Ackerman

The methanol fuel cell that Samsung has been working on for a while now is looking a lot sexier than it used to. Samsung says that it’s able to run a laptop for eight hours a day, five days a week, for a month without refueling. And when you do need more juice, just feed it a new methanol cartridge and it’s ready to go, no waiting.

Although Samsung has obviously made an effort to integrate the fuel cell unit with the laptop itself, it’s equally obvious that (in its current incarnation) it’s not really practical to do this. Why not keep it separate and just use a cord? Hopefully, the reason is that by the time it’s ready for the market, it’ll be no larger than a conventional battery. Hopefully.

VIA [ AVING ]