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Pedal powered generators have been used to power remote communications for a long time: http://www.antiqueradio.com/traeger_pedal_07-99.html That's possibly better than wasting your camp fuel to achieve a charge. Maybe the trick is not to charge the phone, but to run the generator when you need the phone, as these pedal powered radios were operated.

Ah yes, parallel port file transfer. I had a device that did that too - The I-Jam IJ-100. The thing was, it had no internal memory whatsoever. It was soley driven by the Secure Digital card slot. The link I point to refers to 32MB of memory - that was the size of the card that shipped. The reader/writer that connected to the PC was parallel only. USB really was just catching on when it was released and unless you had a built in card reader there really wasn't any other way to use it. I remember asking and getting a 64mb card for Christmas and converting all my songs down in quality to like 64 kbps which sounded tinny but manageable. I was in high school and had no money and a shitty computer, so I really didn't have a big song collection. I think I had like a 4gb drive or something.

Name a "far better player" than an iPod in 2001, when it was released. From my memory they were all lower capacity flash players, larger, heavier, and harder to use laptop HDD based MP3 players, they all had slower USB1 or serial port implementations, and they all had multiple button UIs that made them really hard to use.

Feel free to compare to all the failures that had existed up to the 2001 iPod. Creative had a 6GB $500 11 button over one pound USB1 MP3 player in the year 2000. Today Apple has a Mac mini that is about the same size, same price, and probably more portable :)