Blue Earth
As a tech nerd who currently owns a Blackberry, I’m usually primarily focused on smartphones (like the iPhone and Android phones). However, Samsung’s Blue Earth caught my eye as an example of an innovative and very green design. Notice anything different about the back?
If you said, “those look like solar panels”, you’d be right. Samsung’s Blue Earth is impressively eco-friendly:
- casing is made from old plastic water bottles
- a concerted effort to avoid use of environmentally damaging materials (like PVC, brominated flame retardants, etc)
- the box that it comes in is made of recycled cardboard, and parts of it can be re-used as a picture frame!
- solar panels can be used to charge the phone (in addition to the standard charger that they provide)
- a pedometer to calculate how many steps you’ve taken and what that translates into in terms of carbon saved
The phone boasts a feature set of what you would expect from a typical mid-range phone (touchscreen, 3.2 megapixel camera, WiFi, etc), and CNET’s reviewers were pleasantly impressed with it. The price tag is very heavy, though ($447), but I think its very cool that a market for such devices exists and I hope to see more products released along this particular dimension.
More details from the embedded CNET video review below:
