Normally water and electricity are a combination you'd hope to avoid. However, this ingenious invention (by Stockholm based myFC) can charge a mobile phone by turning water into electricity.
The charger is about the size of a sandwich, and needs a filling of fuel cells to make it work. The ‘proton exchange membrane' (PEM) fuel cell chemically reacts hydrogen - stored ‘tea bag' style - and oxygen from the air to create electricity.
Previously this type of wizardry required pumps, compressors and stacked fuel cells and resulted in devices too large to be truly mobile. However, this is no longer the case.
When it's time to charge up, "the only thing that you do out there in the archipelago or the forest is pour water into the reaction chamber and at the same time put a tea bag into that compartment and close it and off you go," said myFC CEO Björn Westerholm.
The invention gets really exciting for the developing worlds, "to our knowledge, there are about 1 billion people in developing countries that actually have cell coverage ... [and] if they had a cell phone they could use it," he told TechNewsDaily.
The charger should be available for purchase in 2011 and will retail at approximately $40 ($15 for developing regions).
Here is some plug out information in advance of 2011.
[Spotted on Tech News Daily]
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