Medis PowerPack fuel cell finally ships

I've been following Medis for somewhere in the range of six years, and the company has at last done the unthinkable: It's actually released a product, a portable, consumer-ready fuel cell that can be used to recharge your gadgets.

Roughly the size of two or three decks of cards, the Medis 24-7 PowerPack Xtreme is a sealed unit that contains a direct liquid fuel cell inside. It's preloaded with alcohol and some other compounds, and it cannot be refilled in its current incarnation (which means you can take up to three of them on a plane). To activate the fuel cell, you squeeze and shake the unit until it activates (kind of like a glow stick), then plug in a special cable to the unit. Finally, you plug the appropriate tip for your device into the other end of the cable, and let the charging begin. It takes about 30 seconds for the PowerPack to get going.

The total amount of power available from the 24-7 is substantial: It puts out up to 4 watts and up to 750 milliamps of current at a voltage of 3.6 to 5.45V, with a total capacity of 4500 milliamp-hours (mAh). When the unit runs out of juice, you recycle the Pack component while keeping the cable and adapters. The complete kit (including a handful of device adapters and the connector cable) costs $50. Replacement PowerPacks are $25. (There is also a one-watt version of the product for $35, with cables.)

The alternative to devices like these are traditional, battery-powered chargers like Iogear's GearJuice. These are simply lithium battery packs that you charge up via wall power, then discharge back into your phone or iPod when you need it. GearJuice gives you 2000mAh at 5V, seven tips, and an A/C adapter for about 20 bucks. Of course, battery packs have their own limitations, the biggest of which being that they slowly discharge over time, even when not in use, so the power may not be there when you need it. In theory, a fuel cell should always be ready for an emergency as long as it hasn't been activated.

In the future, Medis has said it is planning to build refillable fuel cells (which would have some challenges, such as not being able to be taken onboard a plane), as well as higher-wattage cells that can recharge laptops and other larger electronics. As a first step, this is a capable, if limited offering, though it doesn't really offer anything that battery-powered portable chargers can't give us today. Still, I'm interested in seeing this technology take its first baby steps onto the market as we watch whether fuel cells will really find a place in the tech universe, especially those higher-capacity ones.