Hydrogen, which holds tremendous promise as a new clean energy option is considered as an efficient source of primary energy. Unluckily, hydrogen storage presents the most crucial difficulty restricting utilization of hydrogen energy for real applications. However, Mg metal is the best known cheap solid-state hydrogen storage media with high hydrogen capacity and operational cost effectiveness; it shows high thermal stability and poor hydrogenation/dehydrogenation kinetics. In the present work we have succeeded to prepare nanocrystalline MgH2 powders doped with a mixture of 8 wt% Nb2O5/2 wt% Ni nano-catalytic system. The synthesized nanocomposite powders possessed superior hydrogenation/dehydrogenation kinetics (2.6 min/3 min) at relatively low temperature (250 degrees C) with long cycle-life-time (400 h). The powders were consolidated into green-compacts, using cold pressing technique. The compacts were utilized as solid-state hydrogen source needed for charging a battery of a cell-phone device, using integrated Ti-tank/commercial proton-exchange membrane fuel cell system. (C) 2018 Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.