Inhabitat

Questions as their website doesn’t seem overly informative…

- is the internal battery replaceable?
- does the spinning fan make any noise?
- is it strickly compatible with USB charged devices?

This is a nice design, but the prices on the hand crank flashlights/generators are dropping fast. I recently picked up a 3 LED flashlight with a 5 volt charger connection for less than ten dollars.

Form Follows Function Failure! How much greenwash will you folks swallow before you start to choke??? Who wants to hand hold this thing in the wind long enough to charge any appliance? Thanks to it’s sleek round edge, you can’t even stand this thing up! A clumsy bike mount is only available as an extra cost option. Then there’s another mind boggling device for cinching a bracket to your bicept that would be more useful for shooting smack than charging your cell phone! Whoever designed this was likely motivated by sales potential and not by functionality or concern for our environment.

[...] HYMINI Tiny Portable Wind-powered Gadget Charger This personal wind turbine can be hooked up to various devices to charge your phones, cameras, and other small electronics when you are on the go: walking around, driving or even riding your bike. (tags: eco windpower design npd) [...]

Not sold yet. Needs to be designed to be more functional.

Maybe if you use this every minute of every day for the rest of your life it will cover its own carbon footprint.

The concept is valid.

So are the complaints that it’s made largely of plastic.

Bamboo offers a viable alternative. I live in Asia, and I can’t recall in nearly a quarter of a century of living here (I’m American and came here in my mid-30’s) here seeing, for instance, more than a tiny handful of metal building scaffoldings — almost all are made from bamboo, even for amazingly tall structures. They’re lighter than their metal cousins, so cheaper to transport. And replacement costs are minimal.

Why not downscale that to this?

Sure would be environmentally friendly, as well.

Mekhong Kurt
Bangkok, Thailand

[...] new gadgets for mobile renewable energy: from solar gadget chargers, to kinetic energy chargers, to mini portable wind turbines. Check out this video to learn a bit more about some of the companies behind the most [...]

Interesting how you recommend bamboo instead of plastic. You would have to cut down millions of bamboo to produce a bamboo gadget, which would be covered with a film of some sort to keep it from from breaking which would be made out of the similar chemicals as that plastic container.

It takes 4x as much energy to make something out of wood or paper as it does plastic. And in the end of the day, the plastic could be recycled. Soon most plastics will be made out of corn oil which will cost just as must to manufacter as other plastics.