On a scale of 1 to Russell Crowe, how angry do you get when your phone runs out of battery with no charger or plug socket in sight?
Indeed, it's a problem of the most first-world sort, costing us updated football scores, missed Facebook opportunities and numerous viewings of Hamster Eating Tiny Burrito - which, naturally, is why you'd be well within rights to cite yourself as a big fat 8 on this Richter scale of annoyance.
Though perhaps not for much longer. Here’s Lucid Design’s concept for the Crank Case: a two-piece plastic phone case over a silicone sleeve which contain neatly fitted capacitors to capture energy. Users of the Crank Case simply pull out the ring, tug a few times and generate their own power to give their phones that extra bit of juice.
The designers even claim that, with this product, ‘your phone never dies’. And sure, this glimpse of the future may still need a bit more work before it comes to the market for mass consumption, it's certainly some food for thought.
In fact we might just stop using our mobile phones until the Crank Case becomes a reality. The pain of a drained battery is just too, too much.
