New case for the Apple iPhone 5 lets you crank-charge the battery

Imagine this. You're on the road, you need to read a very important email and your job depends on it. So you whip out your Apple iPhone 5 but you heart stops. The battery is dead and there are no outlets available for you to plug in the recharger. All you need is a little power just to read this email and reply to it. Looks like your job really is in jeopardy.

While the above sounds like a pretty bad situation, if you had the Reactor case, you could easily re-charge the battery on your Apple iPhone 5 by cranking the handle on the case. Gridcase's Reactor also comes with a small 400mAh cell that will boost the battery on your phone and allows you to crank the cell indefinitely. The only problem is that this case has not yet been produced. In fact, it is being crowdfunded by a site called CrowdSupply which is similar to KickStarter but apparently not as restrictive according to the product's developer Jim Clark. Over the next 44 days, Clark hopes to raise $350,000. So far he has $396 in funding as of Wednesday morning (keep in mind that the page just went up).

A pledge of $99 will get you one of the first 10,000 units, to be shipped in November. And if the funding is successful, you can expect Reactors for other phones as well. Clark says that he picked the Apple iPhone 5 for the first Reactor because of its smaller size compared to the Samsung Galaxy S III. The theory is that by being able to engineer the case for a device the size of the iPhone, Gridcase will more easily be able to build the case for larger phones. Additionally, the large installed base of businessmen using Apple's iconic smartphone also led Clark to select the phone for the first Reactor. The expected retail price will be $149.

If you're interested in funding the Reactor, or for more information, click on the sourcelink.

sourcelink: Reactor via TechCrunch