From the man who brought you the wind-up radio back in the 90s, comes the EMP-MX71 an eco-friendly MP3 player. That’s right, no more sucking the planet’s resources dry whilst you listen to your favourite tunes, with a little bit of elbow grease you can be checking out your sounds all night long without a power point in sight.

The EMP-MX71 does more than play tunes too, check out this list of bells and whistles

2 GB memory with SD memory card slot
FM tuner
Voice recorder
1.8 inch screen for photo viewing
Built in mono speaker
Plays MPEG4 videos

For those of us too knackered/lazy to wind this sucker up, it will charge up when connected to the USB port of your PC. Whilst there it shows up as an external drive allowing drag and drop functionality for your media files. For the more eco-friendly of us, one minute of winding action should provide it with enough juice for 40 minutes of playback.

The price tag is 170 sterling which is about US$340 which is not bad given the unit comes with a free self-satisfying smugness that you are saving the planet whilst checking out the latest tunes.

Kudos to Trevor Baylis, inventor of the wind-up radio, electric shoes and now wind-up media player.

I like MP3 players … a lot, so much in fact I’m always on the look out for the bizarre and obscure. I also used to like Rubik’s cubes, yes I was a geek :) So I when I spotted this MP3 player from designer Hee Yong I almost bought it!

Yes, unbelievably you twist the cube to play your sounds, although quite which layers of the cube control which mp3 functions is not obvious so there’s probably a bit of a learning curve involved. Although I’m guessing the central square on top in the image is the pause button!

I do like the neon blue display too - across three squares - although the text looks a wee bit small or are my eyes failing me after all those days in my youth staring a rubik’s cube? Who knows. Anyway I do like Hee Yong’s style, so I checked out his other products and they’re pretty snazzy too. Another couple of my favs that caught my eye were the toaster that changes colour as it toasts and modular radiators in different colours to suit the room’s decor. If you like things a bit more funky and styly check out his site.