No electricity? Use a wind-up phone charger

It’s the end of the day, you need to make an urgent call, your mobile phone’s battery is down, and you are nowhere near an electricity socket. With the ‘‘GoGoPower’’, a wind-up mobile phone charger, you could make that call.

Five minutes of winding the handle will give a mobile phone 20 minutes of power. ‘‘It is not meant to replace the regular charger, but it is great for emergencies,’’ said Nobumasa Neishi, marketing manager at Japan’s Fuso Rikaseihin Co. Ltd, which makes the charger. Priced at $42, the hand-held generator is quite noisy and not cheap, although it comes with a built-in flashlight. It can be used with phones from Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and NTT Docomo. At a trade fair in Bangkok, the charger was launched for markets in Southeast Asia and China, where power is not always available. Fuso Rikaseihin is not the first on the market. Last year, Freeplay, the British company which invented the wind-up radio, and US phone producer Motorola launched the ‘Freecharge’, a charger for Motorola and Nokia phones. Adaptors for other brands are in development, Freeplay said on its web site.