Samsung and LG are coming out with green mobile phones with environment-friendly features before the end of the year. The Samsung Blue Earth has been officially launched last week and is expected to hit the markets in time for the holiday shopping rush, if not earlier. LG’s GD510 Pop is looking at a November market debut with a clearer price indication where Samsung is still silent. One might think LG could come out earlier with an eco-friendly handset, thus making it the first mobile phone on earth to be eco-friendly.
What makes a Mobile Phone Eco-Friendly?
We all have some idea what make anything environment friendly, right? It means consuming less power or being efficient about it and spewing less toxic CO2 and other hazardous materials that contributes to earth’s destruction, global warming being the most imminent.
Industrial toxic waste management, vehicle pollution control, energy efficient appliances with no harmful emissions – these are subjects of containment in greening the planet. But mobile phone? Well, even little things help in the drive.
Samsung has taken the mobile phone into the green zone with its Blue Earth smartphone. Designed to be green right from the drawing board, it uses recycled material and it’s production process counts as a milestone by consuming less energy and emitting less CO2 into the atmosphere.
Even the battery charger that goes with it is green. Samsung certifies it as a 5-star energy efficient charger that consumes no more that 0.03 watts when idle. Of course it’s still better just unplugging it once charging is done. You need the charger especially during wintry months when there’s no sun to charge its solar panel.
Oh yes, it’s solar chargeable as well. It has solar cells that are taking up 80% of the back cover just below the camera. You’ll get 4 hours of talk time after 10-14 hours of direct sunlight exposure. That’s probably all the time it needs to melt the plastic body under the sun, but you get the idea. At least you won’t ever have to deal with low bat when you have to call in the middle of the day. Just make sure you make the call out in the open under the sun if you’re low on battery.
Hardware besides, the Blue Earth does have some eco-tuned application like its Eco-Walk or pedometer that tells you how much CO2 emission was prevented by taking a walk instead of using your car. There’s a software assisted power management that conserve battery by shutting down unused features like Bluetooth if you forgot to turn it off after a while.
Smartphone Features
Let’s not forget this is a smartphone that will thrive or die by the features we’ve come to expect from a smartphone in its class, eco-friendliness aside. It’s nearly luminescent blue body is a real standout from all those lifeless black and silver phones out there. It even gets a blue home screen, not the blue screen of death of Windows though.
With a 3” capacitive touchscreen supporting 16 million colors, an accelerometer, a 3.2 megapixel camera with LED flash, geo-tagging and face recognition, as well as the usual Bluetooth 2,1 with EDR and A2DP, WiFi, microUSB 2.0, stereo FM radio, microSD slot for up to 16GBm GPS/A-GPS support, just to mention some, the Blue Earth is a fully featured smartphone that can command a high price alright. Samsung just might give us a pleasant surprise on that.
Samsung Blue Earth Links:
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