Samsung’s solar powered touch screen phone

Samsung has announced their very first and for that matter anyone else’s, touch screen mobile that’s solar powered.

Under the product name ‘Blue Earth’, this marvel of usefulness comes under Samsung’s fairly new green initiative. A move that also ticks all the boxes in terms of how it and they respect the environment, along with the materials used to make up its design.

Although we feel the tag line ‘The Blue Earth Dream: Eco-living with SAMSUNG mobile’ was a little too hard to swallow, with the additional tackle of ‘Samsung reinforced its commitment to protect the environment through the design of eco-friendly products’ also coming off just a bit too much.

They’ve designed the phone to symbolise a pebble, with its flat and rounded body. We’re entirely unsure if it will skim over the surface of the water if thrown, but we’re sure if it can it’ll walk on water giving off another ‘holier than though’ appearance from Samsung with this handset.

Its rear contains solar panels, as clearly seen, if not slightly embellished in the image above. These can charge the phone, to make calls at anytime and anywhere or so we’ve been told.

Now, here’s one of our stumbling blocks. The only real times we’ve discovered we needed to make a call and the phone is dead, is at the end of the day where there is no sunlight anymore to charge the phone in this circumstance. If they could add the feature of being able to charge via moonlight, then perhaps it could be more useful.

There’s also the thought of emerging markets, with the likes of Nokia series of S40 mobiles that are very very low in cost. If a range of phones could be enabled with these solar panels, it would certainly go some way for them to win a humanitarian noble peace prize someday.

The materials the handsets is made from that are wonderfully kind to mother earth and all her other fictitious dungaree wearing family members. Blue Earth is comprised of recycled water bottles, much like the Motorola phone we brought you news of at the beginning of January. Who would have honestly thought there are enough water bottles handed in each day to warrant not only one, but two mobiles to be made from them?

There are a whole other range of ego friendly features, to appease our dungaree wearing friends. They all fall along the lines of energy efficient Bluetooth modes, screen brightness and backlight settings – all simply activated by an ‘Eco mode’.

Just to hammer it all home, in a very not-so-subtle way is the phones ‘Eco walk’ feature. The handset has an onboard pedometre that works out how much C02 emissions have been reduced, from your day to day walking as compared to driving instead. This feature in turn calculates how many trees have been saved as a result of this action. Hurrah!

We requested a detailed specification sheet, just to find out how long in the sun would take to charge the phone or what the balance would be from a wall charger to solar charges. No spec sheets were available at the time of going to press, but it will be on the stands at Mobile World Congress so we’re hoping more info can be obtained then.

The Samsung Blue Earth will be around in the UK from June this year; no word yet on costs or what networks what will be picking this up either.