Nokia has dropped plans to develop mobile phones with fuel cells for at least the next few years. The firm committed to fuel cells eight months ago but has now said the sector is "not yet mature".

Nokia's Matti Naskali said the firm had not abandoned the technology, saying: "Fuel-cell technology is promising and Nokia continues to follow it closely."

A fuel cell can be re-filled like a lighter, rather than charged. A fuel cell would also allow longer talk and standby times and increased power for power-hungry applications such as video.

They just have to make sure they come back to it before it's too late and other companies are already far ahead.

Skecpticism aside, it is only a matter of time before we have a new way of powering portable electronics.. 3 - 4 hour run times on laptops are just not going to be sufficient for too long

sad, but your comment isnt true by a long shot...
why? because we are at the point of a problem where its hard to get energy densities... battery tech is not keeping up with the electronics...

we desperately need energy storage, though there is not much we can do about it as there are no real breakthroughs on the horizon.... there may be a break through in some part of a known technology, but there are no real new ones...

the stuff we are doing is more than a hundred years old in principals and just that tech makes it practical or at least starts to make such practical...

the main problem here is efficiency... on two fronts...
on one the stuff we are making isnt efficient OVER other less disarable sources...

two, we have no way to integrate power back into the grid from thousands and thousands of odd sources... not to mention that we are not willing to take a long term real durable inneficient item and use it as a commodity... if such were true you could make solar cells from copper oxide films... (2%)...

and a third one... though i know i didnt say three... that we are not willing to generate power for the public good and let it be free... if so then there are all kinds of infrastructure things we can do that would be cost saving and energy generating (like vibration generation on bridges... cconvert vibrations to electricity and you are damping them... by reducing them you lengthen the lifetime of parts... etc.. funnel a bit of the energy back and you can stop rust.. etc...)

but we as a commercial society are not willing to so such without a commercial entity to go to for the service...

we still have a long way to go....