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Fuel Cells To Appear In Laptops In 2004
prostoalex writes "The overhyped fuel cells will finally be delivered to the portable computing market. Toshiba and NEC will incorporate fuel cells into the laptops by 2004. Sony, Hitachi and Casio are expected to follow the suit. The tests show a fuel cell lasting 10 hours. With the form-factor of a Bic lighter, it allows the laptop user to carry a few extra cells in the laptop bag all the time. Battery prices are expected to run at about $200."
I say the venture is worth the risk. A new standard can always be used in different ways than previously planned. Alternative power sources aren't needed for just laptops and if the technology is there, use it!
--"The perfect example of the man of action is the suicide." - William Carlos Williams
Is how much do the refills cost? Surely, 100ml or whatever of methanol is going to last you for 10 hours, but what do you do then?
You can't regenerate it, so you go shopping for a refill?
If one fuel cell lasts 10 hours and is the size of a bic lighter.. why not use 2 or 3 of them, or just make the one bigger to give more life between charges?
How is this a weapon? It's a battery that has a similar shape and size as a lighter. I'm thinking that you must have misread and thought it had some lighter-like functionality. Beyond opening the fuel cell up and throwing it at someone, I don't think it's much of a weapon. And they let standard alkaline batteries on planes these days.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
Call me a skeptic (and I hope I'm wrong), but I don't think 2004 will see this. At least not to the general laptop buying populus.
The business flyers, which probably comprise at least 70% of laptop users, will be hard-pressed to get "BIC lighter-sized" fuel cells onto planes, unless it's disguised as a lighter (which aren't supposed to be allowed anyway).
Imagine explaining to security what that little sucker is.
That the manufacturers will pull an 'Ink Jet Cartridge' here and make it so that these things are not (easily) refillable? Plan on having to buy these only from the manufacturer, at a ridiculously inflated price. The whole Ink Jet cartridge BS is the main reason I stepped up and bought a laser printer for home use.
\/\/oobie
the main problem is that these fuel cells can be easily reconfigured to contain highly explosive materials for use as portable bombs
So can my shoes - in fact that's been tried. All that idiot and would-be-martyr lacked was an adequate detonation system.
We've all seen the monkeys that work security at the airports. They're too busy harrassing honest non-terrorists, taking their bic pens, fingernail clippers, and knitting needles. They won't catch someone who is ernestly trying to sneak something dangerous onboard.
The "portable bomb" issue is ridiculous, what about a water bottle filled with vodka, or propane, natural gas (can't smell it!)
I understand caution, but unless they restrict ALL liquids and bottles, they can't really prevent the "portable bomb" issue
Anyways, a savvy airline would PROHIBIT them as carry ons, and then sell them to users on board, like the movie theaters do with food.
Error 407 - No creative sig found
How about a wind-up dynamo crank on the side of the laptop? Let's make it 1 minute winding = 30-60min power.
$cat
Because they are raping you while they can... It's new, so charge a buttload for it! People will buy it anyway. There are so few places to buy fuel cell devices now that they are exploiting it for all they can get. If I had a way to build the perfect car that can get 100 miles/gallon running on nothing but water and outperform almost anything on the street for $1000 do you really think I'd sell it for $1500? Hell no; the thing would cost $40K!
The NiCads that are used now can be made to short out and explode. Why aren't they banned?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Isn't the laptop you carry now a potential weapon? Pretty dense and heavy, with sharp corners. Would make a nice dent in anyone's head.
And how about those hard, bony hands you have there? One good punch from those could knock someone out!
Or those teeth in your head! Sharp and hard and rigged up to a very strong and effective system of musculature -- you could maim with those things!
Better get rid of all of 'em.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
And in the meantime your tossing tons of batteries into the trash that don't need to be there.
I've got a few sets of rayovac 1800 alkaline rechargables that I use in my digital camera that last longer than a normal set of non-rechargable alkaline batteries.
Right now, how does it work? I use my battery, and it gets low. Then I plug my laptop in and after a short time, the battery is "magically" refilled, and it didn't cost my any money (my electric bill, but that's a few cents max). I can recharge my laptop ANYWHERE I can find an outlet, which is just about anywhere.
Now for the fuel cell battery. I use my battery and it's gone. Now I have to recharge it with a new little lighter sized cartridge thing. I don't want to pay $5 for 'em. I don't want to pay $1 for 'em. If I got a few refillable fuel "cartridges" when I bought my laptop and some kind of home refuling station that would use my natural gas line or something, I would consider it, maybe. I'll take my 3 or 4 hour battery life over your 10 since mine is free. And when do I need 10 hours of battery life anyway? Most people probably don't, as they could probably find places to plug in by then.
So how do you get me to do something like this? Make a fuel cell battery that works with something like pure hydrogen and oxygen. It mixes them to make electricity and stores the water in a little compartment. Then when I plug my laptop into the wall, it uses the electricity to reseperate the water into hydrogen and oxygen and stores them back in their own little compartments. Basically a sealed system that works just like a standard battery. I really don't care what's in it, or how it works, but unless it works a LOT like a battery, I'm not terribly interested. I'm not paying for what I get for "free".
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
methanol isn't exactly expensive
Neither is black ink. But printer companies charge a load for it.
I just hope that the various manufacturers can standardize their cartridges so they become interchangable from one model laptop to the other !!! THIS would be a feature I'd pay for.
Am I the only one tired of such jokes ?
Sunny Dubey
But I get your point, and I agree. I'm just saying things don't always work like that.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Now if only the manufacturers could get together to decide upon standard sizes for fuel cells instead of the current completely incompatible array of laptop battery formats in use. Even of there is large, medium, and small formats for fuel cells, it will be a HUGE help to the consumer as third party competition will keep the prices down... which is of course why industries resist standards in such things.
'course you can get a lil one to run 10+ hours if you're using a 200Mhz Transmeta with no optical drive and a itty bitty 10" screen. I think that's what they mean by "it will last 10 hours." In reality I don't expect this bic lighter to last any longer than my current battery.
If I had a 2Ghz P4 I wouldn't expect it to last more than 2 hours.
My bet is that those 10 hour estimates rely on future expected power saving advancements (read: Vapor!).
I predict that the first and best market for small fuel cells, and where the technology will incubate until it is ready to spread wider, is in hand tools for construction workers (e.g. house framers). They already use tools that chew through multiple battery packs in a workday. They also already have tools (nailers) that are both battery powered and have small fuel tanks that are used to generate small explosions. They are ready and willing to deal with fuel cells that might be noisy, hot, smelly, and perhaps even slightly dangerous. I'm sure they would welcome a tool that chewed through cheapy single-use methanol tanks, rather than having to carefully rotate through an assortment of battery packs every day, sometimes at a site without electrical service.
There's no reason they couldn't. I'd expect to see some enterprising folks building battery-sized fuel cells to retro-fit older laptops.
As a side note, hopefully this technology will filter down to PDAs too.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
They're going to be $200 each, which tells me they WILL be refillable by the user, because nobody is going to pay $20/hr in fuel cost to use their own laptop. Even inkjet printers can't get away with THAT level of gouging. (On the other hand, it's in the same price ballpark as present laptop batteries, so we aren't talking about massive up-front gouging either.)
They run on methanol (which is cheap, available over the counter in quantity, and already has enough applications to be widely available at least by mail order) and water (which is not only cheap, it's usually the very LAST public utility to fail in an emergency). Procuring the fuel ingredients will not be hard. And if you're going to be on the road a while, you'll be able to bring fuel with you.
I concur that it'd be nice if they could recharge from a plug. But on balance I'll still call this a major win if it's delivered somewhere in the general neighborhood of on-time and working even kinda sorta like the article says.
The best weapon and one they will never ban from airplanes is a broken bottle.
Grip the neck of the bottle like you would a baseball bat and breake it. You get a razor-sharp, multi-blade bad-ass piece of glass that looks like a Warcraft artifact. Gypsies use it all the time.
Funny thing is they never say a word about the bottles, it's maybe the biggest deal in aiport duty-free shops.
But they do take your nail-cutter. Sheesh...
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Expect laptop system prices to eventually drop because of this technology. Any business knows that consumables are the real way to make a profit. Just like your inkjet printer that cost barely more than the refill cartidge (just so you don't just go buy a new printer with a starter ink cartridge), your laptop will cost a couple hundred dollars while its "official" and proprietary fuel cell refill will cost about $45.
In the long run, you'll spend much more on refills than on the original hardware, but the initial purchase will seem cheap.
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
I don't think it's the fuel cell they will object to, it's the 200 "refills" in my carry-on that would worry them. :)
Is EVERYBODY here just responding to the last
crappy Terminator movie? Recap: cyborg Ahhnold
(Republican!) throws his "fuel cell" out the car
window and as he drives away, it causes a massive
nukular (Republican spelling) explosion in the
desert.
I remember seeing that and thinking of how
screwed up it was to see a republican cyborg
driving a gas-guzzler and trying to scare America
away from cleaner energy sources. That movie is
the only contact most Americans will have with
fuel cells, and they blew it (literally) for
decades to come, I imagine...
Judging from the response of the Slashdotters so
far, I'd say the collective brain damage was
pretty severe!!
-- The Funk, The Whole Funk, And Nothing But The Funk