Electronics, Lighting, & Gadgets - hand crank usb cell phone charger?

they are pretty cheap...around $5 or less. any1 here tried it and does it work well? are they worth it? do u recommend any? if so, links would be great.

I found one at East Coast Market Place for $5 with several phone adapters and a built in led flashlight.
It doesn't have usb and wont crank battery up to full but will give you some extar minute for calls.
I only use my phone sparingly when on tour, so I don't need a lot of charge. I also carry my a/c adapter to charge when taking a shower at a campground.

Seems pretty useless to me. Even if it's very well built, I'd imagine you'd have to crank for a long time to charge a battery. Cell phone batteries plugged into power take a few hours to charge - that's not because they can't draw a lot of current from the wall, they can. It's because the batteries are not designed to take charge very fast. So if you have a dead phone, you'd better be willing to crank quite hard for 30 minutes to even get much of a usable charge into the phone, and several hours to fully charge it.

Honestly, I'd put more faith in solar panels. I don't know why touring folks don't have a panel on top of their panniers, they don't weigh much and they'll charge your stuff all day long. You could even work out a system for repositioning the panel every few hours to make it face more into the sun.

I think you would be better off with a flexible solar panel. It would look goofy, but you could attach a soft panel to the back of your jersey, and run the wires to your phone in a back pocket.