Samsung's new yet-to-be-launched solar phone, the Blue Earth, just may work because it goes the extra mile
Samsung's new yet-to-be-launched solar phone, the Blue Earth, just may work because it goes the extra mile
Today, going green is so hot that everybody is doing it. In fact, companies are now falling over themselves showing how green they are, just as companies a decade ago tried to show people how they were a part of the Web.
But a decade ago, many companies floundered on the Web because they didn't get a full and integrated Web strategy in place. They just put some Web feature and advertised their product as 'Web enabled'. Similarly, today, many companies are adding one or two green features to their products and acting as if they are completely green and saviours of the planet.
A refreshing change is the Samsung Blue Earth. We don't know much about it in fact, since it is still to be launched, we don't even have the price but even the few details we know about this phone are impressive. While we at iT ADDA would love to review this phone so that we can tell you how green it really is, right now, let us stick to just the list of features as claimed by Samsung.
Completely green
The phone has a solar panel at the back and this can be used for charging. The target audience could be two typesu2014those who care for the environment and those who spend a lot of time in outdoor surroundings, where wall outlets are not always easily available.
The phone does come with its own charger, but both the phone and the charger are said to be free from harmful substances like brominated flame retardants, beryllium and phthalate. The charger is also energy efficient it is a 5 star energy efficient charger and its standby power is lower than 0.03 watts.
The phone is also made from a recycled plastic called PCM, which is extracted from water bottles. This means that fuel consumption and carbon emissions during the manufacturing process are reduced.
Walk more
But the feature that we liked the most about the phone is a pedometer-based eco walk feature. This actually measures how much energy you saved depicted as the number of trees that you have saved by walking instead of using some form of motorised transport.
Apart from the eco walk feature, the phone also has an eco mode feature that allows you to access all the energy efficient features of the phone with one click. These features relate to the brightness of the screen, the amount of time for which the backlit display stays on, and usage of Bluetooth. While many of these features may be very useful while camping and using the solar cells for power generation, they could also find usage among green users on a daily basis.
Integration matters
While the full details of the product are only expected to be announced at a press conference on February 16th (check samsungmwc.com for more details) the fact that the company has worked to make various dimensions of the phone green should deserve our praise. Let's hope that other vendors also do something similar and give us phones and other devices that are green not just in name but in almost everything that they do.
QUICK TAKE
>>Samsung is planning to release its Blue Earth mobile today
>>The interesting thing is that several features of the phone are green
>>This is different from other green devices, which don't always have many green features
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