Once and Still a Techie Weblog

Water-powered mobile phones

The dangers of global warming are probably getting to the Samsung engineers who’ve developed a hydrogen generator and micro-fuel cell that runs on water. Hey you’d want to have an alternate source of this life-giving resource if, let’s say, your watter bottle ran out in the middle of a heat wave or something and instead of dying of thirst you whip out your cellphone…

But seriously though, how it works is when you press the phone’s power button, water and metal in the phone react to produce hydrogen gas which is supplied to the fuel cell to generate power. And presto the phone turns on.

Here’s a diagram to make it visual (anyone speak Korean?):

The system is capable of generating 3 watts of electricity which is enough to power the device for 10 hours. That’s twice the talk time regular lithium batteries currently allow.

And no, this isn’t something you hope to see when you buy your grandkid a new phone in 10 years. One of Samsung’s research VPs says water-powered phones will be hitting stores in 2010. That’s right. Less than 2 years to go folks, just about when global temperatures rise a degree or so…