Given that the entire raison d'etre of Nokia, SE et al is to encourage us to buy the latest greatest handset and then throw it away as soon as possible, how they could ever claim to be green god alone knows.

Still waiting to see a handset with a solar power strip on the back so that it'll charge itself without being plugged into the mains.

What should we call products that hype thier green credentials while actually doing nothing to help the environment. saving a few millilitres of paint and using a couple of watts less energy while recharging will have about as much effect as not weeding your patio.

There are countless other examples of this type of promotion - Tescos carbon numbers, shells greener diesel the absurd fabric conditioner add claiming smaller plastic bottles are saving bunnies.

We need a nice adjective so we can dismiss such products with a single word.

Greedery? suckerFriendly? ecoFraudly? ecoLies? salesHugging?

I am sure El Reg readers can come up with something better before the Pubs open.

Mines the eco friendly leather one with carbon free studs.

How about 'ecoTards'?

these companies continue to bring out eco friendly things and they continue to design them to fail.

the hybrid cars priced for the normal market are designed to be ugly so they dont appeal to the masses. the ones that look nice are usually priced way above what the normal person can afford.

these phones ae designed eco friendly yet lack any innovation or anything that the masses will want in a new phone.

why do companies continue to design eco friendly things that live up to the "because its sco friendly it has to be boring" stereotype.

Greenwash.

"Still waiting to see a handset with a solar power strip on the back so that it'll charge itself without being plugged into the mains."

You'll be waiting a while - and then a while longer for it to charge. With the efficiency of solar cells (about 15% max) and the environments mobile phones are used (indoors, in pockets, etc) this is totally impractical.

But no doubt someone *will* bring one out, to snag the gullible. I once bought a cheap bicycle computer which happened to boast it was solar powered. I concluded the "solar cell" was a fake - take the battery out even in direct sunlight and it died.

"at least Nokia's acknowledging the need for environmental sustainability"

Not so, Nokia's acknowledging the consumer trend to snap up anything with the words 'green' and 'eco' in it's title. Now if only they could get away with calling it the iGreen phone, they wouldn't need to do any marketing, and it'd fly off the shelves 10x faster than ianything ielse i!

Fast Company did a piece on a much greener phone several months ago. It was a concept developed by Frog. No solar cells, but it has a hand crank that can be used for charging. That seems more practical to me.

I'm surprised no one has taken this concept and run with it yet (although the "food sniffer" component seems a bit kooky and could certainly end up on the curb).

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/120/at-frog-being-green-isnt-easy-its-essential.html

Oh yeah of little faith.... "You'll be waiting a while" .... Not true at all. It happened 10 years ago!

The original Nokia 1610/1611/1630 range (circa 1998/1999?) had an optional battery which had solar panels on it.

Admittedly this was an early GSM phone and thus quite large by today's standards, but a benefit of that was the rear surface area of the battery (which just slid straight on/off the back of the phone and therefore was itself the rear panel of the phone) was a fair size.

"Nokia estimates that if all its phone users across the world unplugged their chargers when not needed, it could save energy equivalent to that needed to power 100,000 average-sized European homes."

Oh great - so it's "our past designs are a massive contributor to global warming so that we could save a nickel on every model, but we're getting so go buy this overpriced low tech phone!".

The most ecological choice is naturally not to upgrade and just soldier on with last years model.

It's worth checking out Greenpeace's site which ranks electronics manufacturers by their "greenness". Last time I looked, Apple got a bad rating, and Sony was towards the top.