By Jon Van, Chicago Tribune Instead of lugging around extra batteries to keep your cell phone energized, someday you may just buy it a drink and the little rascal will happily keep working hour after hour. At least that's the scheme that Motorola Inc. is backing in conjunction with Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. They are working to miniaturize fuel cells to power wireless phones in place of batteries.
Fuel cells work something like batteries with a fuel tank.
They convert chemicals to electricity, much as batteries do, but instead of needing to be plugged for hours to recharge when they run flat, fuel cells perk up as soon as you feed them more chemicals. In Motorola's vision, the fuel cells would run on alcohol mixed with water and oxygen from the air. The fuel cell cocktails would be packaged in little containers that you could just slip into your wireless phone and let it guzzle away while you make call after call. Tiny fuel cells could also be used to power laptop computers, Game Boys and a host of other portable electronic gizmos. The cells on Motorola's drawing board would run about 10 times longer than today's batteries before needing a new fuel supply, and the only waste product from the process is water, which would be expelled as vapor.