I am not sure about you, but now that it is getting colder outside here in the Philadelphia area – the first thing I do in the morning is check the weather. I was recently searching the net 
and found an interesting trend emerging on the other side of the world in Japan. According to research by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), about 20 percent of Japanese check forecasts on their new or refurbished smartphones. The thing is the people of Japan are not only looking up the weather, but they are now voting on it. Several weather services are competing via the official portals of cell- phone companies: DoCoMo’s i-mode iMenu, KDDI au’s EZweb and SoftBank Mobile’s Yahoo! Keitai. All of those services, provide basic information, such as today and tomorrow’s weather predictions, but the majority of the sites mentioned have a pay-for-service as well. Continue reading »
Ready for work.
Some research group in Japan has built a charger for cell phone batteries that uses hydrogen fuel cell technology. They say that once their partners are fully on board, the item will be available for sale at about $30 a piece. The hydrogen fuel itself will be sold in small blue plastic tubes, which will need to be inserted into the charger. Each tube of fuel is expected to cost 30 cents. The spokesmen for the research group feels that the tubes are small enough and inexpensive enough to be sold at convenience stores like 7-Eleven. According to the research group, each tube of fuel will provide a two-hour charge for a cell phone.
My question is why the hell would I need this? Is this supposed to be geared towards the person “on the go” who may run out of cell phone battery in the middle of the day and need an emergency charge? Don’t we already have several options in existence to take care of this, specifically an extra wall charger or a car charger? Granted, they need some sort of outlet, but is that so hard to find? If you know you are someone who is out of the office for extended periods of time, why not buy an additional battery to carry around? They are cheap and small. With this new charger, I’d have to carry the charger around and then go buy tubes of energy each time I want to use the thing. No thanks, the outlet at Macdonald’s is free.
I understand that hydrogen fuel cell technology is environmentally friendly but as opposed to what? Maybe someone can correct me in the comments of this article if I am wrong, but is the electricity that goes through my wall charger and into my battery really bad for the environment? I just don’t understand why companies spend so much time and money coming up with these products. Make a battery and a hydrogen charger for my car so I don’t have to buy gas anymore. That I’d go to 7-11 to buy.
