Hasta La Gadget!

We love the Earth, and apparently so do Sprint and Samsung. The two companies have just introduced the Reclaim, a super-eco cellphone made from 80 percent recycled materials. The device — a stout, sliding, QWERTY message-friendly model — is constructed from “bio-plastic” materials made from corn, is free of PVC, and mostly free of BFR (brominated flame retardants)… which are apparently pretty bad. The phone also has a 2 megapixel camera, stereo Bluetooth, can accept microSD cards (we assume) up to 32GB, and has Sprint Navigation onboard. The packaging will be eco-friendly as well, as it’s constructed from 70 percent recycled materials and printed with soy-based ink. The carrier will be selling the Reclaim in “Earth Green” or “Ocean Blue” come August 16th for $50 (after a $30 instant rebate and $50 mail-in rebate) with a two-year contract. Additionally, $2 of that profit will be funneled to the Nature Conservancy’s Adopt an Acre program. Finally, a phone that goes with your Prius.

Filed under: Cellphones

Samsung and Sprint introduce the Reclaim — a cellphone made from corn originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 Aug 2009 09:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sprint and Samsung have unveiled the Reclaim, an eco-friendly cell phone that’s made of bio-plastic and other recycled materials. The 3G QWERTY slider includes GPS, a 2-megapixel camera, and stereo Bluetooth support, and comes in Earth Green and Ocean Blue. (The green one looks perfect for anyone who owns one of these.)

The Samsung Reclaim will hit retail channels on August 16th for $49.99 after a two-year contract and various rebates. Whenever someone buys the phone, Sprint will donate $2 of the proceeds to The Nature Conservancy’s Adopt an Acre program, which highlights land conservation and natural habitat preservation across the U.S.

Sprint has also launched several new environmental initiatives. It has established a set of design criteria for all future phones, it’s adding dedicated display areas in stores to remind customers of its eco-friendly nature, and it’s also committed to reducing paper usage by 30 percent over the next five years.

[Our sister blog GoodCleanTech attended the launch event this morning at New York’s Cooper Hewitt Museum; check out the post for more info and pics.]

Sprint has just announced a couple of new devices in the hot new area of Wi-Fi enabled, personal cellular routers. Both of these let you share your Sprint 3G or WiMax connection to a number of Wi-Fi equipped devices, like notebooks, cellphones or even Eye-Fi cards, although if you want WiMax service right now, you’ll have to head to Baltimore.

The main differences between the two boxes are size, and capacity. The smaller Personal Hotspot PHS300S (left in the picture) lets you connect just four devices and the bigger brother, the MBR-1000 will let 32 people hook up, and is aimed at setting up a mobile office.

Neither are as svelte as the little battery-powered MiFi, also available for Sprint (and which I am using to post this article from the Great Outdoors), but then, they’re really meant for getting work done rather than messing around in the park.

The boxes will cost $160 for the little one and $250 for the antenna-sprouting MBR-1000 and can be had only in areas which offer WiMax (Sprint will expand to Portland, Atlanta and Las Vegas in August). We have a feeling these handy little hotspots are set to take off, although it’s still a pain to have to carry two devices. What’s really needed is, say, a cellphone with both 3G and a Wi-Fi radio inside. We’d suggest the iPhone but that’s still gelded by AT&T.

Press release [Sprint]

This article was written on December 29, 2006 by CyberNet.

Some of the most popular software in use on computers is open source. Personally, I would rate Firefox, OpenOffice.org, Gaim, FileZilla, Apache, and Thunderbird to be my favorite open source applications. That doesn’t sound like much, but that’s because I use a lot of freeware applications in addition to the open source software. A free application is not always open source, and more times than not, free programs make the source code unavailable to you. Sometimes it is to prevent people from stealing their code, and other times it is for security purposes (so that people can’t look at the source code to find vulnerabilities).

OSAlt.com provides a great list of open source applications broken up into categories. Initially you might be confused when viewing the software because they do have commercial applications mixed in, but in the upper-right corner you’ll see a drop-down menu where you can select “Open source software” as a filter. That way you see only the open source options for each category.

Another great site that I found is called Open Source Scripts. I would say that this is more useful from a programmer’s perspective because it organizes the open source software by the language it was written in. After you select the desired language, such as C/C++, it will show you a bunch of categories for open source software that has been developed. This can be a great educational tool and an awesome source for help when your trying to create your own program.

Thanks for the tip on OSAlt.com tito!

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By far the slickest, most mystical way to charge a smartphone these days comes courtesy of Palm’s Touchstone system — but that doesn’t do iPhone owners much good, which is where WildCharge steps up to the plate with a jacket that makes all iPhone models compatible with its wire-free charging mat. It’s not as elegant by any stretch of the imagination, but if you squint a little, the jacket (or “adapter skin,” as WildCharge calls it) looks like a totally believable case that you might buy in your local Apple store, especially if you can get past the hump at the bottom. iPhone Buzz took the $79.99 pad / jacket combo for a spin recently, and while they’ve yet to post impressions, the shots of the system doing its thing in its natural habitat might be enough to turn folks on or off. Ultimately, we still think we fall on the “just drop it on the dock before you go to bed” side of this argument — especially considering the weird hump-laden jacket with exposed metal contacts on back — but if you’re looking for an easy way to charge from a second location that doubles as a conversation piece, WildCharge might have your answer.

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

If Apple had a huge, shiny Touchstone: WildCharge for iPhone checked out originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 06 Aug 2009 08:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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