![Flashback: Samsung Blue Earth and the short story of solar-powered Flashback: Samsung Blue Earth and the short story of solar-powered phones](https://spark.solaristek.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/1572808800_Flashback-Samsung-Blue-Earth-and-the-short-story-of-solar-powered.jpg)
As fears around world warming rise, the matter of recycling and renewable power sources are usually in the news and social media. This brought back recollections of a mobile phone that encapsulated both the Samsung S7550 Blue Earth.
The most distinctive function of the cellphone was the photo voltaic panel on its back. It was a neat search and a lot more importantly, it had a simple application an hour in the sunlight billed the battery more than enough for a 10 moment mobile phone get in touch with (on a 3G community) or two added hours of standby.
The photo voltaic panel was built-in into the back again deal with and related to the cellular phone applying pogo pins. There was a compact blue LED that lit up when the cellphone commenced charging from the solar, assuring you that youre working with clean up vitality.
The Blue Earth was eco-helpful from birth. It was produced from recycled PET water bottles and arrived in a box manufactured of effortless-to-recycle paper and printed with soy ink. Improved nonetheless, Samsung gave you guidance of how to reuse the box as a picture body or a pencil box (you know what they say, reduce, reuse, recycle).
Eco box for an eco cellphone
The phone had a a person-click on Eco method that altered display brightness and Bluetooth settings to extend out its battery life. But it also encouraged you to use significantly less electrical power way too.
As many telephones right now, the S7550 experienced a stage-counter but instead of calories burned, it calculated how significantly CO2 would have been launched in the environment if you drove a motor vehicle rather of strolling. It saved keep track of of your high score and nudged you to try out and beat it.
Blue Earth’s move counter inspired you to decrease your CO2 emissions
The Blue Earth was not Samsungs very first solar phone that was the E1107 Crest Photo voltaic, which arrived a number of months before. It wasnt the initially to use recycled products possibly, that was the E200 ECO from the earlier year. But equally of all those were being essential aspect telephones with constrained functionality.
In distinction, the Blue Earth was a appropriate touch phone not a smartphone per se, but it ran TouchWiz, which was halfway there.
The Blue Earth ran TouchWiz with widgets and multitasking
The mobile phone packed a 3 touchscreen (240 x 400px) and permit you browse the internet around 3G or Wi-Fi. It highlighted a running a blog application and could send MMS messages with photos shot with the 3.2MP digital camera on the again.
There was an MP3 participant and Bluetooth with A2DP, additionally a 3.5mm headphone jack with an FM radio receiver. There was even a respectable document viewer that could manage Phrase, Excel and PDF files.
The Blue Earth was a tiny enjoyment equipment
You might assume that the Samsung Blue Earth would be the fantastic cellular phone to have if youre stuck on a desert island or going off-roading into the wilderness with the solar panel, youd in no way operate out of juice, as well as you could have up to 16GB of music (if you remembered to load up your microSD card) and the several games that arrived pre-loaded.
With the Solar panel end users can normally rely for plenty of cost to make a contact
Also, there was a GPS receiver and Google Maps. Even so, that was in advance of Maps supported offline mode, so that wouldnt be considerably assist except if you experienced reliable 3G protection. The Maps app didnt aid navigation both, so you would have had to come across your possess way back again to civilazation.
Thats a idea we wouldnt want to test ourselves, having said that. For a single, the phone wasnt water-proof. And online games and music would drain the battery speedier than the solar panel could refill it.
Castaway daydreams aside, the real disappointment will come from the truth that solar driven phones in no way caught up. There was the Sagem Puma Cellular phone from 2010, but that appears even fewer well-known. At the very least recycling caught on you may listen to quite a few brands point out making use of recycled elements to build the phones as very well as recycling old telephones.