Toshiba�s (near commercial) Fuel Cell

Those of us involved with high powered mobile devices know all to well the very real constraints posed by the limitations inherent in current batteries. A portable device isn’t portable tethered to the wall by a power cord any more than one with a dead battery is of any more utility than a hockey puck. That’s why I keep a constant eye out for Fuel Cells small enough to replace the batteries in mobile devices.

There’s been a bit of a race recently between a couple of the major Japanese manufacturers, including Toshiba, Hitachi, and Fujitsu, and even Panasonic and NEC have entered the fray. With nearly a billion cell phones being produced each year not to mention the hundreds of millions of other battery powered devices like MP3 players, digital cameras and the like the stakes are absolutely massive for the first company to release a truly viable product. One other issue faces all the companies above; Methanol, the primary chemical component of this generation of the technology, is not permitted on aircraft and the best guess as to when this limitation might be relaxed is some time in 2007.

Tags: fuel cell, mobile phone, battery technology, oliver starr
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