Always an important one, I find. ;)

40 minutes play from one minute of winding? That's...damned impressive, actually. I could quite easily sit winding the crank idly while waiting for a train, and give myself an hour or so's playback. I like it.

Brilliant idea, though possibly a little bit niche.. My battery powered mp3 player serves me perfectly well. I can see people who travel a lot making good use of it though!

But for the love of god, why does it need to have a built in speaker?

1) The sound quality will be rubbish

2) It probably won't be loud enough to be useful

3) It will annoy people on buses/trains

4) It adds to the size and weight

5) It adds to the cost

Remove the speaker and knock £10-20 off the price and maybe I'd be sold.

why dosent he just make a little gadget to that winds up then you plug your mp3/4 device into it? rather than having to buy a whole new device?

just make a hand-crank unit that you can plug into your existing gItPod or whatever to charge it - like that solar powered thingumy that already exists.

I'm sure that there would be more of a market for that than for yet another mp3 player...

And ++about ditching the speaker!

I'm a child of the 80s.

When i grew up then the era was filled with transistor radios in buses and it irritated me, then came the walkman which eventually made people stick it in their ears as so did I and journeys was once again silent.

Nowadays with the influx of mobile phones w mp3 players the nuisance is back.

It irritates me still with top40 songs being blasted here and there.

Why mono?

It's a brilliant idea as it'll save up batt life.

Having stereo speakers won't be any difference on any devices that small if you wanna compare to quality of sound especially if you're an audiophile.

No matter how 'good' a company boasts a mobile phone's speakers is, it will always be sub-par compared to the real deal speakers. In a way it is the new age transistor radio.

PS: Stereo makes no difference in less than a meter apart from each other.

http://www.ecodigital.co.uk/estore/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=66

which makes it a tad expensive - if it was half the price, I think I would definately get one given the abilities of it (including video playback).

Or perhaps he could develop an external battery pack with wind up charger? Just imagine - all it needs is a nokia and usb port and my dreams would come true...

Sorry i didn't include a reason why a speaker is good to my opinion.

It's annoying that's for sure, refer to previous comment.

But when I'm out with my woman or friends in less public spaces/places a mobile on the go music adds up to the atmosphere no doubt.

Mono is good enough and bang for the energy cranked :)

Cheers.

If he made a wind up toaster we truely would have the next best thing since sliced bread, something to toast it in.

With the volume turned up to 11?

I have enough of kids with their bloody mobile phones on busses without some plank watching video through a crappy tinpot speaker on a bus, remove it from the device and it becomes properly portable.

Why build a wind-up MP3 player, why not a universal windup charger, so that with one device you can charge your phone, PDA & MP3 player

2Gb internal memory and an SD Card slot.

Not too shabby.

Not a lot of use to those of us who have already invested in an expensive MP3 player. I'd have been more impressed with a hand-powered charger for my existing unit.

Although I can't remember who made them. I saw wind up (general purpose) battery chargers several years ago. They might have been less efficient (don't know, never actually had one), but they were definitely around 3 or 4 years ago and as several people have already said, more useful if you can plug it into lots of gadgets

You can buy today wind up battery phone chargers on eBay, e.g. the one from Orange can charge devices like cellphones.

Lyndsay Williams

www.lyndsayw.com

I'm sorry, is this guy going to get a round of applause every time he puts a handle on something that uses electricity ? Yes, granted, his wind up radio was nice, but surely the novel concept was the handle/storage cell combo, not that it powered anything in particular.

Que the wind up toaster, wind up cell phone , wind up multimeter ...

"PS: Stereo makes no difference in less than a meter apart from each other."

Actually it does, before I got my Archos AV500 I tried out a Cowon A2, the Archos AV500 has a single speaker and is pretty naff for listening to music/films but the Cowon A2 has stereo speakers and it makes a whole lot of difference when compared to the AV500. Turn on the A2's surround and the effect is fairly good, if watching a film where a car drives from one side of the screen to the other the sound travels with it more ot less, but with the AV500 the sound just gets louder and quieter with nothing to indicate which direction the sound is going.

The small Creative TravelSound speakers also have a surround switch which can greatly enhance the sound from films.

"PS: Stereo makes no difference in less than a meter apart from each other."

Actually, it does, and not just for the reasons stated above. There are certain mixing techniques that mean if both mono tracks are combined, or only one is played, some of the instruments are lost.

But, then, people who listen to music where this matters will probably be listening alone on expensive headphones or earphones.

Personally, I don't care about people playing "music" through tinny speakers on public transport though -- as I am one of those people I mentioned in the paragraph above.

"Bloody Windows. Forty minutes of arsing around for one minute of productive work. It's really f***ing winding me up........... hold on, I've got an idea!"