The idea behind fuel cell batteries in cool, the practice of it however will definitely not be as cool. For laptop and cell phone manufacturers batteries are major money makers. If you were to eliminate the money made off batteries a lot of manufacturers would be in serious financial hurt.
Laptop and cell phone batteries are fairly cheap to manufacture, far cheaper than the ridiculous retail markup we're forced to pay for them. They are a handful of Li-ion cells packaged in a plastic box with a power regulator attached to some wires. The cells are manufactured by third parties and bought in bulk by OEMs. A $100 battery from a laptop OEM costs them a small fraction of that to manufacture. They figure you need a battery for your laptop so they can charge what they please and do.
The same thing goes for ink cartridges in printers. They are dificulously simple and dirt cheap to manufacture. We get charged an arm and a leg for ink cartridges, plastic tanks with ink in them. Printer manufactures have been making it steadily more difficult to refil ink cartridges you already have as well. The end result is the customer being charged up the wazoo for plastic tanks filled with ink.
Now combine these two situations, which is exactly what fuel cell batteries do. The battery might cost you $200 but then you've got to figure in the cost of refill cartridges. Even if they were a dollar each that would be ridiculously expensive. Ten hours worth of li-ion battery power costs me a fraction of a penny. A $1 methanol refill for a fuel cell would be absurdly more expensive, even for ten hours of laptoppery. Unless I can pick up fuel cell grade methanol or denatured ethanol for less than a dollar a gallon a fuel cell battery is just as much of a scam as cell phone batteries and ink jet cartridges.
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