TelecomWeb's Believe It Or Not: The Water-Powered Cellphone
Japan's NTT DoCoMo, working with a previously-unheard-of company called Aquafairy Co., says that the two have jointly developed a water-powered micro-fuel cell for use with 3G FOMA handsets. The fuel cell, which NTT DoCoMo plans to show publicly for the first time next week at a Japanese wireless trade show, is claimed to be the smallest in the world. As of this morning, the carrier said it had been able to wring two watts out of the thing. Overall, NTT DoCoMo says, the widget is one-quarter the size and delivers twice the power of a methanol fuel cell prototype it was showing off about a year ago as part of a joint project with Fujitsu. What's happened to the Fujitsu project is unknown. The new water-powered phone combines NTT DoCoMo recharger technology with a thin-film power unit from Aquafairy and a catalyst that produces hydrogen from water. That hydrogen is used to power a recharger the carrier says can recharge a handset "several times" in about the same time as it takes an AC adapter to recharge a phone. The concept on which all of the companies are working is to create a charger small enough to be part of the phone. The charger then recharges the batteries used to run the phone as needed. NTT DoCoMo, Fujitsu and the mysterious Aquafairy are only a few of the various companies and teams in the race to create marketable fuel-cell-powered cellphones. Last fall, KDDI, working with Toshiba and Hitachi, said that it had developed a working fuel-cell-powered cellphone, using a battery claimed to deliver 2.5 times the capacity of regular phones running on just a squirt of methanol. Methanol, researchers say, is proving to be a difficult substance to use in the fuel cells, reportedly destroying the cell membranes after only a couple of months of use. Then, too, there is an environmental issue with consumers running around with little tubes of methanol. The problem everyone is attempting to solve is how to deliver the increased power demanded by cellphones as they become laden with such non-phone features as mobile-TV capability. NTT DoCoMo says it has been working on more powerful Lithium-ion batteries in tandem with the fuel-cell project. So far nobody has come up with an estimated cost of phones built using fuel-cell technology, nor have there been any estimates of when such a widget might be ready for market. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Duane Whittingham (N9SSN) - Producer Tom and Darryl Radio Shows & Saturday Morning Confusion Heard on C-Band Analog Satellite (W0KIE) - Telstar 6 Ch 1 - 6.2/6.8 WTND-LP Macomb 106.3, WQNA FM, WBCQ 7415 kHz & the Internet. Heard Fridays 9pm ET, Sundays 12am ET and Tuesdays 2am ET (Folk) An Independent Freeform Eclectic Radio Show. http://www.tomanddarryl.org http://www.wtnd.us Reply with a "Thank you" if you liked this post. _____________________________ MEDIANEWS mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
