Gadgets are nice, everybody loves them. Anything electronic will definitely wake up the kid in every man. But when it comes to anything on battery power, it will sooner or later run out of batteries. It’s no problem with things used frequently, but if it’s something used from time to time, like a flashlight for example, looking for the new batteries is so annoying. The problem becomes even more acute with cheap things. There is always a temptation to just get a new item rather than search for the batteries for it. I can see it in how my neighbor’s kids are changing their watches: since it does not seem easy to them to replace a battery in a watch and since there are so many kinds of watch batteries to make finding the right one not a trivial task, they would have a new electronic watch every year or even sooner. When I ask them what happened to the old watch, it’s always: “Oh, I liked it, but then the battery died, and getting a replacement is such a chore!”
That’s why there are always some technology items being developed on human power. I’ve heard about mobile phones and even laptops you can crank to give them power. And we have several things of the kind in our catalog: here comes a wind-up torch, for example. And this wind-up feature not only makes the life-span longer, it also makes it interesting. It brings back the joy of having something unusual and high-tech, something you would not really expect from a flashlight.