Fuel Cell Laptop announced by Toshiba 187
Steve writes "Following on from the Fuel Cells approved for airline cabins story a week or so back, it would seem there will soon be a need for that approval:
Toshiba has announced a fuelcell powered laptop for 2004,and possibly a PDA."
Where to buy replacements? (Score:0, Interesting)
Fuel Cell... (Score:3, Interesting)
Any idea what these are actually fueled with? Alcohol or something proprietary?
Good idea, except... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yay? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Nothing gets on planes. (Score:5, Interesting)
So, you can take a butane lighter on board a plane, but only one at a time. On the other hand, you can easily order several alcoholic drinks like vodka which would combust very nicely from the comfort of your spacious seat.
Tiny Methanol powered fuel cell (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, it's kind of stupid, but it's neat to be able to play with a real fuel cell.
Glad to see this! (Score:2, Interesting)
Batteries quite frankly suck and I travel alot. Expect at least 1 customer (me) to buy one of those fuel cell laptops.
One thing I do wonder though, is environmentally how will a disposed of fuel cell treat the environment as opposed to a disposed of battery?
Fuel cells? (Score:2, Interesting)
They're jumpy enough that my friend, when he joked that he had "Yeah, and a big brick of C4" in his bag to a National Guard soldier, they detained him for 6 hours and -- I exaggerate not -- gave him a full cavity search, tore open his shoes, and destroyed his laptop looking for bombs.
Though it may be an advance, it may be banned from airplanes by paranoid maniacs like John Ashcroft.
Recharging fuel cells (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Yawn (Score:3, Interesting)
Doubt it (Score:0, Interesting)
Is every engineer there totally confident and fully knowledgeable about all aspects of fuel cells? If so, then they surely know how to deal with:
- current limits
- bipolar plates
- Efficiency and open circuit voltage
- Efficiency and efficiency Limits
- Efficiency and the fuel cell voltage
Not to mention they should have a firm grasp on:
- The Effect of Pressure and Gas Concentration
- The Nernst equation
- Hydrogen partial pressure
- Fuel and oxidant utilisation
- Fuel Cell Irreversibilities - Causes of Voltage Drop
- Activation Losses
- The Tafel equation
- Reducing the activation overvoltage
- Summary of activation overvoltage
The last thing anyone wants is a fried laptop. Imagine walking away from your new Toshiba fuel cell-powered Pentium 5 laptop only to come back and find the screensaver off because the entire unit is charred like a cod on a plate of Fish 'N Chips!
and... slashdoted... (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, this is pretty cool. Although we'll have to see how the fueling method works. Some people mentioned a 'cigarett lighter' type thing you could buy, but we'll have to see how much of a 'revineu source' these companies consider it... It would kind of suck if they cost as much as the ink cartrages for most printers
Even if the price is down to $2-$3 a cart, I'd still rather go with the practicaly free eletrical power from an outlet then disposable carts.
And finaly, eletrical power is so cheap that most people don't mind if you just plug your stuff in. When I bring my laptop just about anywhere, I can feel confident I'll be able to find an outlet to plug it into. I could even get an adapter for my car (actualy, an 9vdc->120vac to plug my 120vac ->12vdc power brick, but hey it works
With these things, you're SOL. Personaly, I think it would be cool to combine the two into a hybrid solution, a 30min/1hr battery that you can charge while using via a plug or via the fuel cell system. That would really give you the best of both worlds.
Of course, when we can get fuel cell's for $0.20 and fill them up anywhere (say, people put natural gas taps in their kitchen or something
(oh, btw. I'm tying this in on a server machine, that dosn't happen to have any spell checking software installed. Now you can all see my horrible spelling in it's full glory!!!)
Re:Probably missing the point (Score:1, Interesting)
This came with the possible promises of 1 month cell phone life, and 15 hour laptop run times.
It would be a great thing to pop a plastic cylinder of alcohol into your laptop, PDA, cell phone, etc. and not worry about finding an outlet.
But nothing ever really came of it. Maybe the platinum mesh proved to expensive to manufacture.
Re:Refilling fuel cells? (Score:3, Interesting)
This would be much safer for the user, and probably easier to deal with from a production, maintenance, and disposal point of view.
Re:Finally (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes! I want to run my laptop for a week on a single charge! If I can buy a $14 lithium-ion battery for my cellphone that'll let me use it for a week, why can't I buy a battery that'll run my laptop for that amount of time?
I wouldn't demand that it be 1/8" thin and weigh next to nothing -- after all, I'm not going to carry my laptop around in my *pocket*. Still, though, shouldn't it be possible to make a battery pack that'd get the job done?
With the popularity of wireless networks, it has become a pain to have to plug in the laptop to the electric outlet while you spent that money to set up a wireless entwork so that you could stay on the net without any wires.
Right! Can anyone speak authoritatively to this and answer the question "What would it take?" If I'm willing to spend $3000+ for a laptop, I'd probably be willing to shell out a reasonable price for a portable power source that'll run my laptop for as long as my phone. What's stopping the battery makers from selling such a product?
Is there a reason that no one is doing the equivalent of wiring up 30 of those cellphone flatpack batteries in parallel and selling *that*? Would that work?
Or is the power drain for an illuminated LCD screen and current-generation CPU & hard drive still so high that they'd have to sell it with a steel frame, rubberized luggage handle and wheels?
Re:Glad to see this! (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd imagine it would be much, much more environmentally friendly. The batteries currently found on laptops are full of fairly toxic heavy metals, which is why you really shouldn't take them to a landfill when they give up the ghost. In contrast, a spent fuel cell couple be as simple as a piece of plastic that can be easily recycled. Far less waste, and far better for the surroundings.
Battery Life Could be Better Today (Score:4, Interesting)
* Axe the CD-ROM drive. Who needs a CD drive on their laptop? Axe it, use large amount of gained space for battery space. Spinning CDs *eats* power.
* Make the screen smaller. Laptops used to have much smaller screens, and improvements in power usage haven't made up for the bigger size. Use a smaller screen. (Heck, there's a nice industry already doing this on an extreme scale with the Vaios and similar).
* Do not use an x86 processor. Repeat after me. Intel and AMD both make processors completely unsuited for laptop use.
* Get rid of the floppy drive. Use saved space for more battery. No one uses floppy drives any more.
* Axe the 3d hardware and extra video crap. No one is going to play Quake on their laptop anyway -- lousy form factor, and trackballs, trackpads, and nipples are all awful at Quake control.
* Have "premium" batteries. It costs more to make fancier, longer lasting batteries? Okay, do so and then offer both fancy and less fancy as an option.
Oxygen depletion (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Battery Life Could be Better Today (Score:3, Interesting)