Toshiba launches first commercial refillable fuel cell charger

No company in the consumer electronics industry is more hell-bent on the idea of fuel cells than Toshiba, which trots out innovation after innovation in this space every year.

Finally all those years of research seem to have led to a breakthrough that we consumers can actually obtain.

To wit: Toshiba is now launching a product called Dynario, an honest-to-God methanol fuel cell which, unlike other "fuel cell" products on the market, can be refilled endlessly with liquid fuel by the consumer. (Other products purporting to use fuel cell technology have been around for a couple of years, but none of them can be refilled -- a key component to most experts' definition of what a fuel cell is.) A standalone device, it's designed to be used to recharge existing battery-powered electronics like cell phones and digital cameras, much like a traditional, battery-operated portable charging device.

Dynario is only available in Japan for now, and it isn't cheap: $328 in yen equivalent for the device and about $35 for a 50ml refill bottle of methanol, enough for just two recharges of a cell phone. That makes the technology almost absurdly expensive even to consider -- about $18 in methanol alone just to recharge your phone once -- but hopes are high that the technology will get cheaper as production ramps up. For now, just 3,000 chargers, each a bit larger than the size of a candybar cell phone, are being produced.

Toshiba's ultimate goal for years has been to embed this technology directly into consumer products and remove the battery from the equation entirely, but it still feels like we're a long way off from that day. Fuel cell-powered cell phones have been demonstrated as prototypes, but as PC World notes, there's no estimate on when such a device might ever see the light of day -- particularly in the U.S.