Solar powered gadgets are nothing new. At a time when energy conservation becomes increasingly compelling due to the planet’s unabated peak oil demands, the negligible power needs of mobile phones is still not a priority compared with fuel-driven cars, manufacturing industries and major home appliances.
But here comes Samsung peddling its Blue Earth smartphone as if using its green features would save the planet. Well, why not if everyone starts using it.
First appearing at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the Samsung Blue Earth got nearly forgotten by a slew of other exciting handsets until now. Samsung just announced its release and we can expect the market to see them starting this month or in the last two months of 2009.
Earth-Friendly but not Wallet-Friendly?
First off, it’s blue, not green. Samsung may have had its signals crossed but they’re quite right to make a green handset blue. After all, being green just means it’s eco-friendly. The Blue Earth sports some unique features considered the first of their kind when it goes to market this holiday season – long enough for LG to play catch up and release its own version of the green handset in the LG GD510 Pop at about the same time.
The street price has yet to be released but expect this to be on the high end side. Samsung has its priority straight when they designed this to be an eco-friendly mobile phone. It wasn’t meant to be wallet-friendly. Someday perhaps, the two aims will meet, but not today.
Samsung has intimated some details about what an eco-friendly smartphone is. First off, it was made using eco-friendly production processes that emit less carbon into the atmosphere and consume less fuel. The handset itself was designed to be eco-friendly from the start specified to use Post Consumer Materials or recycled stuff like old water bottles, recycled paper for its carton package and soy-based ink. There are no harmful substances used such as Brominated Flame Retardants in the plastics or PVC.
Then the handset gets a charger that’s certified 5-star efficient in accordance with the EU initiative to rate electric consumption of appliances sold in the EU. It consumes less electricity with just 0.03 Watts on standby. Now no handset gets charged on standby so it’s curious why Samsung had to specify this.
Now its solar panel surfacing for the back cover is indeed cool. But only when it get hot, meaning, exposed under the sun for 10-14 hours to get 4 hours of talk time. Just be sure you take it out before the plastic body starts to melt under direct sunlight. One thing is sure; you’ll never get a low bat warning during the day, except perhaps in the winter months.
Now for the Phone Features
Eco-friendliness aside, we still expect the phone to behave and look like a phone. The Samsung Blue Earth doesn’t disappoint here. It’s your basic quad band GSM with 3G support for HSDPA/HSUPA for avid internet surfers on the road. You get a 3” WVGA capacitive touchscreen supporting 16 million colors and accelerometer, a 3.2 megapixel LED flash camera with geo-tagging from its GPS support as well as face recognition and VGA recording at 15fps.
The usual microSD support is there for up to 16GB, Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR and A2DP, WiFi and stereo FM radio with RDS. Samsung is not about to compromise on any of its high end features to deliver an eco-friendly phone alright.
Samsung Blue Earth Links:
Tags: Samsung-Blue-Earth