Micro fuel cells: extended battery life for PMPs
Posted January 11 2008 5:58 pm by kobewan
Tags: battery, pmp
Personal media players and cellphones look like they may have their batteries lives extended in the not-so-distant future due to the efforts of Angstrom Power, if the Vancouver-based company’s CES showing is to be believed. They’ve managed to put together fuel cell architecture, micro-fluidics, and a refillable hydrogen storage tank into a magical potion combination that they are calling “Micro Hydrogen”. This could potentially lead to a replacement battery type for the lithium-ion batteries that are in common use today.
How does this benefit us, you ask? Besides hopefully having the tendency to you know, not explode, these batteries would have the additional benefit of doubling battery life and having an insanely fast 10 minute charge time. According to recent surveys, short battery life is one of the main reasons customers don’t buy PMPs. This should hardly be surprising, considering just about anybody who’s tried watching videos on their Axim or Zen has had to power-off half way through a movie.
One very promising thing about this technology is Angstorm says it has already been using its new battery for six months in a stock Motorola phone, so there may not be too long of a wait before these kind of batteries hit the mass commercial market. On the other hand though, there hasn’t been any mention of pricing so far.
Micro Fuel Cells [Information Week]