Portable fuel cell

Charges an iPhone 10-14 times, and looks pretty small and pretty lightweight.

The technology is pretty cool too. This could be the best "recharging" option yet. Wish they'd give a price though, the "early adaptors" market comment doesn't bode well for "cheap"

Nice! That makes a lot more sense than burning camp gas or wood for hours to excite a Peltier device.

That is cool isn't it?

It's really odd that they didn't even mention backpackers in the Press Release. And while very few of the commenters said they backpacked, several pointed out that it was really best suited for our market.

The retailer selling it, Brookstone, doesn't even have an "outdoor sports gear" category on their site, and they have a lot of different categories there.

I found the PR on CNET, a tech site.

Ha!! What are the odds? They have a Brookstone store here, in Taney County MO, just 10 miles from where I live

Wish they'd put an REI here

I'd like to see one of those up close. You can build your own fuel cell...thousands of plans on the web, but nothing tiny and self contained like that.
Butane is light and cheap and 14 charges is substantial.

I just threw a "solar cell phone charger" in my junk box because even in bright sun, it barely kept up with the phones demands and would require 9-18 hours to charge a dead phone, IF, it could keep the phone alive at all.

The best thing I've come up with yet is a kinetic charger that converted your body movements to power, like a shaker flashlight. Still, you had to be moving all day.

There ain't no free power.

My understanding on these devices is that they are bigger heavier and less powerful than batteries. Plus they are incredibly expensive. As far as I know their are not any advantages of these devices other than saying you have fuel cell to recharge your phone. They really are only marketed to early adopters for a reason.

I looked a bit but didn't find any detailed specs on this product yet. The team that created it has some pretty impressive credentials.

I think there are some advantages here. The main one being that you can bring fuel cartridges to resupply the charger and each one is equivalent to 12 batteries.

I'm not sure the device would be heavier than a dozen batteries either, which is probably closer to a fair comparison, and if you add one fuel cartridge it's the equivalent to two dozen batteries, and so on. So, if you want to do some intensive use of whatever devices you have this may be a great solution.

It might also double as a hand warmer

I've been looking into the "Raspberry Pi" and GPS, compass, weather and other modules that can be hooked up to it so I can make my own custom handheld devices. In the process of doing that I've come across some other ideas.

A GPS that does nothing but track your path might be made very lightweight with a very low power consumption, and probably pretty cheap too. Check these out:

GPS Recievers

If you hooked one of these up to a tiny breakout board with just the componants to record the data to a SD card you could probably get it weighing in at just a few ounces with rechargeable batteries that would last for days. I know there are small devices that do this, but I'm thinking of something that you can attach to the top of your pack and forget about until you get back.

That compass module at that site is pretty neat, and they have some other cool gizmos there too. I'm going to start playing with some of that stuff, I just can't resist it