Samsung's solar Blue Earth launching in Sweden this month, elsewhere soon
By Chris Ziegler 
posted Oct 14th 2009 1:32AM
posted Oct 14th 2009 1:32AM
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not bad for a first gen product
Finally i can be green on my phone too. "rolls eyes"
I bet the swedes get many hours of sunshine this time of year
Yes, many hours in a month
Irony
i⋅ro⋅ny –noun, plural -nies.
1. To release a solar powered phone in November in Sweden.
Synonyms:
Samsung, sarcasm, satire
Example:
Looks like they pulled a Samsung with this one.
So they've decided to release it, in Sweden, in November.
Have you ever been to Sweden in winter? There's barely ANY sun!
But in the summer it nerver sets:)
trees saved by you buying this phone= 9
trees destroyed by samsung to make their millions of other phones= billions
hypocrisy= 100%
amount I really care= .01%
Well that much is obvious. The not caring part that is.
The screen is showing the resulting amount of trees saved from an 'eco walk' whatever the hell that is, not by the purchasing of this phone.
fail= ∞%
amount I really care= -∞%
There is no such thing as negative infinity.
Actually, there is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_real_number_line
I don't think saving money on electricity, or CO2 emissions is the point. The point is that you don't have to carry your charger around with you - you can put your phone on your desk and it will charge itself.
Pretty cool, but I doubt you can really get that much power from such a small solar panel.
Yes, exactly - so since -∞% doesn't exist - neither does his interest.
amount I really care=-∞%
Pretty clever way of saying he doesn't give a darn about it.
hahaha eco walk
1. Hack it to say you save a thousand or so trees.
2. Show it off to some eco loving ladies
3. Hippy sexy time
4. Gigity Gigity Alllriight.
I'd very much like a similar phone in the US - I often find myself with a low battery and nothing nearby but a window. I'm sure it wouldn't be my sole method of charging, but there are times when it would be helpful.
It has to be built in to the phone, because buying a solar charger requires me to plan my battery being low... if I were going to plan that, I would just charge it.
All you have is a window? Get on the grid hippie!
true.. all marketing hypes... how much one could save electricity by not charging one's cellphone. where we have 100K more things where we can save 1000K times more electricity than this minuscule tree eater...
Is extra/new things added is eco friendly, what was its dev cost bla bla bla..
If you really want to save environment try bigger ones around u (switching off TV while not watching ;-)).
i think the phone might track the other 1000k things you can save power on... at least that would be my guess. otherwise I totally agree with you.
Very little indeed.
Recharging a typical phone over the course of a year will take about 1 - 2 kWh of power.
I'm not in the US, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe electricity costs about $0.12 per kWh...
So, assuming you can completely replace the charger with the solar panel (which you most certainly can't), you probably can't save more than 25 cents. You can bet that the solar panel costs a lot more than that.
The benefit to you is therefore negative.
However, there are hundreds of millions of phones in regular use across the world - multiply that energy use by hundreds of millions and there are some pretty big savings to be had... assuming you don't use more energy than you will save in use while manufacturing your "green" phone ;)
of-course there is a sure shot benefit of forgetting the charging schedules and chargers and plug etc.
I guess this was not in marketing list coz being totally on solar power charging was not as expected. i mean may be we have to charge occasionally using conventional charger mechanism.
This is a cool idea, but I have to wonder how long during the day a phone is even outside. I mean, for me it's in my pocket 99% of the day and I don't think the 10-15 minutes max I'm actually using it are enough to charge it. But I guess maybe if you had something like this you'd wear it on a lanyard thing to make sure it got sunlight.
It seems a better technology to put in cel phones to self-charge would be some sort of magnetic thing like they use in flashlights where you shake the device, and the batteries charge the battery, and engineer it so that it will charge while you walk, similar to how a mechanical pedometer can tell your steps.
good idea, but it would add too much to the size.
God I love America, what with our weird cell phone frequencies that nobody else in the world uses.
AT&T and T-Mobile use GSM which is used worldwide - yes, they use different frequencies within the standard but the others were already in use in the US and Canada.
I suspect you are talking about Sprint and Verizon that use CDMA.
I guess nobody told Samsung that we have quite a small amount of sunshine here in northern Europe, especially during winter... It can easily be 2-3 months with only 1-2 days of direct sunshine. Talk about usefulness when it comes to solar chargers...
According to the limited research I've done most light will actually charge the solar panel.
http://www.glrea.org/articles/howDoSolarPanelsWork.html
So unless you plan on never having your phone see the light of any kind then the solar panel has SOME usefulness.
This is really a reply to The Aussie's comment (in reply to atheos's comment):
I haven't read the article you mentioned in your comment The Aussie, but what you wrote is the way I understand solar energy powered charger to work..."most light will charge the solar panel"
Even in Winter, most of Sweden should still get 2 - 4 hours of daylight...
I'm pleased about Samsung solar Blue Earth and its integrated solar charger, it's a way forward for promoting effective use of Earth resources. Well done Samsung...
Atleast this'll save me from making those embarassing 4am calls to my brothers :D
And here in northern Sweden we wont even have a sunrise for a couple of months. But i can really see the use for a solar powered phone when one goes hiking in the mountains in the summer. The sun never sets.
But then again, there is no service there. So whats the point.
Samsung demonstrators told me to charge the device fully - real conditions, not paper promises - you'd need ca. 50hrs of full vertical sun exposure.
Now the reality check: imagine cloudy days, sitting at an office desk a few metres away from the window... no comment. "Ecological window-dressing" ;-)
The facetiousness is strong here. Disregarding the "green" angle entirely, what is there not to like about about a phone with a built-in solar panel ? Leave it on your desk while you're at work, and you'll be topping up the battery continuously. The attitude that "little things don't matter" (e.g. charging your phone) is entirely the wrong, lackadaisical one that's contributed so much to ecological problems over the years. If millions could be persuaded to do "little things" like not leave devices on standby every day, it'd go a long way to reducing energy and carbon footprints.
Normally putting sensitive technology in direct sunlight damages it...
At my job I would look like a hero of the forest based on that Eco-Walk concept. I work in a warehouse, and I walk around all day long. I'm really not saving anything though, because it's not like I can just drive my car around. Walking in general does not equal saving trees.
Remember when Nokia did this solar thing 12 years ago? The press release is still online:
http://press.nokia.com/PR/199701/775492_5.html
Wow, I new that other countries were backwards but I didn't know they still burned trees to generate electricity. How archaic.
Actually the Scandinavian countries supply a lot of the green energy in europe through using wood from sustained forestry, you cut down a part and at the same time grow a new equal or larger sized part, the growing makes it take up carbon from the atmosphere, the net result is a zero addition since the released CO2 is re-absorbed by the new forest they constantly cultivate.
Now in backwards countries (like the US and china) they use a lot of coal, that's millions of years old organic matter that adds CO2 to the atmosphere without any compensation going on and coal is generally considered the most outdated and polluting way to do things, although they do scrub the smoke somewhat at least in modern times.
Comes with a coupon to have a transparent pocket sown on your clothes I guess.
Oh and a note to samsung: even when people put their phone out on a table they don't do it with the screenface down most of the time, due to dirt and scratches you understand.
Not that I don't like the concept of solar charging, but I fear this needs some more thinking.
Now that is a beautiful phone.
it should be launched at Greece 1st
it's sunny 11 out of 12 months per year
Have any of you left your electronics device in direct sunlight, especially during the summer? How did that go? Did they still work? How about if you do it several times a week for several months at a time. I predict that these phones will be failing all over the place due to the heat of direct sunlight. As we all know (or most of us anyway) heat and electronics do not mix, so how can this be a good idea?