The first green mobile phone on the planet comes from the Korean mobile phone giant Samsung.  But it’s really blue.  It’s called the Samsung Blue Earth, first unveiled at this year’s Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, putting to the fore Samsung’s commitment to environment-friendly products found in its other consumer electronic line.  It should be available in UK markets any time now as Samsung just officially launched it last week.

Eco-Friendly Features

Samsung proudly claims its Blue Earth handset is made from PCM or Post Consumer Material – recycled materials like old water bottles, recycled pulp for its carton packaging printed with soy ink (what is that?).  Its manufacturing process used technologies that lower fuel consumption as well as carbon emissions.  The handset together with its charger are made of materials free from harmful substances like PVC (Polyvinyl Chloride), BFR (Brominated Flame Retardants) and Phthalate.

As a signatory to the EU pilot program for Voluntary Agreement of European Commission IPP (Integrated Product Policy), Samsung is providing energy efficiency rating on its electrical gadgets that include chargers. The new Blue Earth gets a 5 star energy efficiency rating on its charger which consumes just  0.03W of power in standby mode where it might end up most of the time as the handset is also solar chargeable.

Its back cover is mostly made up of solar cells that convert the sun’s light energy to electric charge.   You get about 4 hours of talk time on 10-14 hours of solar charging.  Yeah right, that’s probably long enough to melt the plastic body of the phone under the sun.

But done sparingly, you won’t ever get low bat warnings in the middle of a call during the day; the charger remains your main charging source.  The Blue Earth does feature a unique “eco-mode” that squeezes out the most out of the battery by intelligently conserving its power when idle mode like lowering the backlight or turning off the Bluetooth if not used for long. There is still no pricing information from Samsung and most online pundits are one in saying it will be in the high end price bracket.

High End Features for a High End Price

Okay, eco friendly or not, let’s see if it has the features that can hold up to what the competition has in its price bracket.  After all, unless you’re an avid Greenpeace member, it is doubtful people will get a mobile phone on the strength of its environmentally friendly features.  So are its high end specifications at a glance.

The Samsung Blue Earth is your 2G quad band GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 and a dual band UMTS 900/2100 on 3G Network with HSDPA/HSUPA. It sports a gorgeous 3” Wide VGA TFT LCD capacitive touchscreen supporting 16 million colors with the usual accelerometer for auto-rotate viewing.

Internal memory is on the low end with just 180 MB which can be expanded with microSD expansion for up to 16GB.  You also get local high speed data connectivity with Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR, WiFi 802.11b/g.  There’s also A2DP for Bluetooth stereo earphones.

Imaging gets a 3.2 megapixel camera with LED flash, geo-tagging from its GPS/A-GPS support and face recognition while video recording is VGA at 30 frames per second.  There’s a secondary camera for video calls on 3G.  Not entirely bad for a high ender.

Samsung Blue Earth Links:

• Samsung Blue Earth Deals
• Samsung Blue Earth Contracts

Tags: Samsung-Blue-Earth

This entry was posted on Monday, November 9th, 2009 at 2:37 pm and is filed under Samsung News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.