Camera Phones Plaza

All those feature-packed cellpones you see around can die out pretty quick if you go ahead and abuse their functions. You never know exactly when the battery gives up, leaving you with a piece of useless hi-tech in your pocket. Here’s an interesting alternative to power savings: juice up your cell phone just by cranking it up manually. This idea is already embodied in the Bamboo phone designed by Gert-Jan van Breugel

Just to prove that this is for real, the Bamboo cellphone managed to make it in the finals of the 2008 Greener Gadgets Design Competition. Eco-friendly all the way but how does it work? You have to key it up for around 3 minutes, so you can generate enough charge on your phone to take you through one call (the duration per charge is not known). That means you get rid of that pesky charger and you get a power-saving mechanism, as well.

The cell phone case itself is made up of 100% bio-degradable materials such as corn and bamboo. So when you throw the phone into a compost (save for the special battery, antenna and circuit-board), it will decompose completely in a few weeks. That said, the phone doesn’t compromise on looks either. However, it could use some color flavors.

There you have it: a sleek, eco-friendly phone design that is cheap to manufacture.