Hitachi Shows Off A Fuel-Cell PDA

prostoalex writes "Hitachi made a PDA, powered by a fuel cell. The device runs for 5 hours, and they plan to expand the battery power to 40 hours. It weighs 700 grams, which makes it heavier than most of the models out there. The commercial production will start next year, a picture is available from MobileMag." (This earlier mention of Hitachi's work talks about how such fuel cells could be used to charge or power other things, from cellphones to laptops.)

Comments

Shouldn't they just concentrate on laptops

[mustrum_ridcully]

Wouldn't it be a better idea if they concentrated on fuel-cell powered laptops instead of PDAs? I would kill to have a laptop whose battery lasted 40hours, and was topped-up using cigarette lighter gas (butane)!

I don't see the battery manufactures jumping for about this one, if fuel cells do get sufficiently small and cheap then there'll be a few very worried companies out there.

Re:Shouldn't they just concentrate on laptops

[Lumpy]

That is the funny part, most people dont realize how much power generating capacity they have around them every day. I do long range biking and camping. My cellphone, zaurus, GPS, digital camera, and toshiba Liberetto all get recharged with either the solar panel I have, the Motorola hand crank charger they made 2 years ago for cellphones, or from the generator I have on the bike. I have never had to want for power on long camping/biking trips away from a car or electrical grid. Now some of you nature freaks will lose their mind at the amount of gear I carry with me but I prefer to document my travels and take gobs and gobs of photos (uploading to the liberetto at night is nice to clean out the CF cards and gives me a chance to look at the shots) I can recharge all my gear sitting and connected in the left rear pannier bag from the bike mounted generator that runs on a tire, within the 7 hours I am riding that day and is trickle charged by the Smallish solar panel on top of the pannier bags.

this fuel cell devie is cool, but still nowhere near as clean and renewable as human power/solar... and their first products needs to be a pocket power source instead of a laptop or PDA.