Back in 1996 a relatively unknown inventor by the name of Trevor Baylis won numerous awards (and made a shed-load of cash) from one of the cleverest inventions we've seen in the last couple of decades.

His wind-up radio would save the punter a fortune in batteries and help guarantee they'd always have enough power to listen to the footy scores at the beach. After a string of upgrades and transformations the technology has finally spun itself into the digital age with the release of a wind-up MP3 player.

You'll get around 10 minutes of playback for sixty seconds of effort and, although the device is very basic, with no display or additional features, there is support for both MP3 and WMA file formats. It offers 1GB of non-expandable storage and there's a USB-port at the top if you want to plug it into a computer to save expending any unnecessary energy. At about the size of two boxes of matches it's pretty compact to boot.

The ‘Cranking MP3 player' is currently on sale for around £30.