May 08 26

Time for some bright green ideas

Posted by Jo Best @ 14:25 0 comments

Mobile phone companies have seen the green bandwagon go by and are flinging themselves on it faster than you can say "lazy, greenwash-spewing me-too merchants" but in the pantheon of would-be eco-friendly mobile makers, Nokia is coming up with some of the best and worst ideas on the market.

Here's a few for your consideration. First, a "zero waste" charger to stop electricity being squandered by people who are too lazy to unplug their phones when the batteries are full.

According to Nokia, researchers are working on three prototype zero waste chargers at the moment, designed to stop all this energy hogging: "The first uses a button to charge, so leaving it plugged in means it doesn't draw power and the user needs to hit the (green) button to set the charge in motion. The second simply charges the device for one hour before switching itself off whilst the third concept actually has a conversation with the device, where the device lets the charger know when it needs power, and when it's all done."

A charger that only sucks energy when the phone needs it and breaks the connection when the battery is full is so blindingly obviously a great idea that I'm still wondering why, in a post An Inconvenient Truth world, we don't all have one. Hint to Nokia: when you're creating those prototypes, stick a solar panel on them for good measure.

Then there's the "wears in, not out" concept. Details on how this bad boy — unveiled at a London design event last month — actually works are sketchy. Nokia describes it like this: "as more services become available on our mobile devices this concept explores how people could potentially upgrade their devices digitally rather than physically in the future, giving people an additional choice on how they use and update their mobile phones."

I'm confused about this, given most people do update their phone digitally anyway. Over the air firmware upgrades, operating system overhauls, even installing a new widget: it's not hard right now to update your device digitally without updating it physically.

That said, while it's a nice idea that you can extend the life of a phone using digital upgrades, it's not a hugely practical one. Most people update their phones for hardware, not software, reasons: to get a better camera, for example, or a smaller form factor, or because they think a touch interface looks cool — or just because their old model is a bit knackered. A system of digital updates simply can't make those upgrades happen.

For that matter, digital rather than physical upgrades are entirely counter-intuitive for Nokia. A phone that you don't upgrade for 25 years would mean that the handset maker would need to create devices that sell for, say, around 10 times their current price to keep its bottom line healthy. I suspect bumping up the average selling price of a Nokia device to several thousand dollars would prove as popular as a bad fart in a stuck lift, both for consumers and operators — let alone Nokia's accountants.

Then there's Nokia's recycled handsets. Nokia boss Olli Pekka Kallasvuo showed off a video of the Remade handset at the Mobile World Congress trade show earlier this year. Its housing has no new materials — it's all plastic bottles, car tyres and recycled aluminium cans. As phones go, the Remade gets a big green thumbs up.

Of course, it's just a concept: a great big fat concept. The device shows what Nokia can do, but it doesn't actually work. There's no phone guts inside it. It's just a nice housing which doesn't function and there are no promises any of it will ever show up on the market.

Nokia does have a real "eco" model out on the market though. It's called the 3110 Evolve and it beats the Remade in that you can actually go out and buy one and it does actually work. In terms of ambition though, it's rather lacking.

Its housing is 50 per cent "renewable material", the box it comes in is part-recycled and its charger is more "energy efficient" than Nokia's previous models. It's not exactly going to save the planet, is it?

Given that Nokia has ably demonstrated that it's got some good ideas up its sleeve on the environmental front, why does it think that palming off lazy nonsense like the Evolve 3110 is going to impress anyone?

We know you can do better, Nokia. So do it.