First seen at CES years ago, Horizon’s MiniPak has (finally) gone on sale for $US100. It’s the first personal, portable fuel cell—if you don’t count the Japan-only Toshiba one—and is like a mini power plant for charging gadgets.
It eats refillable cartridges (coming bundled with two), with each cartridge giving the equivalent of 1,000 AA batteries. At $US100, you can see it’s going to end up saving you quite a bit of money. Not to mention help save the environment, with fuel cells being a clean and cheap way to generate energy. More on that can be explained here.
A bunch of connectors are included, so your smartphone/gaming console/other portable device should be supported, with up to 2W of power surging through a USB port. It’s dead-small too, fitting in the palm of your hand, only slightly larger than the object you’re charging up. [MiniPak via GizMag]
Jase
Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 9:45 AMTo clarify: Each catridge stores energy equivalent to 6-8 AA batteries and then you need to recharge it. The recharger costs USD$499… (lifted straight from their breaking news email).
Steve
Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 3:07 PMOnce your over the initial cost (device + cartridge recharger = US$600) you may start saving money but you certainly aren’t saving energy.
Producing the hydrogen takes significantly more energy than you get out and fuel cells aren’t all that efficient yet either.
Also, please fix the part in the article about the 1000 AA battery equivalence. I think that’s probably the lifetime of the cartridge as the capacity of a single charge is two orders of magnitude less.
Please try and do some research and fact checking before posting these articles. Somebody needs to think of the children!