The hands-on approach

Inbox: The next time you plug in a gadget to recharge, stop yourself and just think for a second. Are you going to be back in two hours when the mobile or iPod has recharged?

Chances are you won't, and you're not alone. Recent research revealed that the vast majority of people over-charge their gadgets, wasting millions in extra electricity costs and leading to yet more global warming from over-worked power stations.

Wouldn't it be great if we could just use a little old-fashioned elbow grease to power our gadgets? Well, now we can.

Trveor Baylis, a British-based inventor, hit the headlines a few years ago when he invented a radio which could be powered by clockwork. All that was required was a few turns of a crank handle and the radio would sputter into life.

This seemed like a backward step until it was quickly realised that the radio would be a godsend to people in developing countries who are often starved of access to news and life-saving information as much as anything else.

Now Baylis has turned his sights on the almost ubiquitous media player, which so many people carry around today. The appropriately named Eco Media Player (available from Ethicalsuperstore.com for €220) will run for 40 minutes with just one minute of hand-cranking and combines a (deep breath now) music player, video, FM radio, torch, sound recorder, photo viewer, mobile phone charger, ebook viewer and data storage into one device.

The media player will play a variety of audio formats including MP3, WAV, WMA, and ogg Vorbis. The compatible video formats include ASF, ASV, AVI, WMV, and MPEG.

Baylis claims an estimated 20 hours of audio playback on a full charge. That's a lot of cranking, but in practice you would never sit for an hour winding it up, but simply give it a little boost every now and again.

If you are not feeling up to it, you can also recharge the device via USB connection, but in theory it never needs to be plugged into the wall.

Although there is only 2 GB of internal flash memory, equivalent to approximately 500 songs, the SD card slot means you can carry around as much as an iPod Nano 8GB for videos, photos, and audio. The full colour LCD screen is 1.8 inches in size, and the device itself is a chunky 4.5 inches wide by 2.5 inches high by 1.25 inches deep.

It may not be the slimmest and sexiest media player on the market, but then few media players pack their own power source.

With "carbon footprint" one of the buzz phrases of 2007, anything that keeps the ice-caps from melting has got to be useful. Admittedly, most people would rather just plug their digital media player into the wall and forget about it. But the inconvenient truth is that this costs money, and it is the planet itself that's paying, literally.