Hasta La Gadget!

Eco-friendly phones are all the rage among handset makers now.  Samsung became the third phone manufacturer, after Motorola and Sony Ericsson, to offer a device made from biodegradable materials.

The new Samsung phone, called Reclaim, is a slider-style phone with a QWERTY keyboard and a 2 megapixel camera.  The phone will be available on Sprint’s wireless network starting Aug. 16 for about $50, after rebates, and with a two-year contract.

Green phones have taken off this year. At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Motorola showed its W233 Renew handset whose plastic casing is made of recycled water bottles.  In June, Sony Ericsson announced two new eco-friendly phones.

Reclaim follows that trend. The phone is made from 80 percent recyclable materials, said Samsung. A bio-plastic material made from corn makes up about 40 percent of the phone’s outer casing. The device is also free of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and nearly free of brominated flame retardants (BFR) — materials that organizations such as Greenpeace have been actively lobbying to eliminate from gadgets.

The packaging for the phone and the phone tray inside the box are made from 70 percent recycled materials, claims Samsung. Images and text on the box as well as the phone warranty information are printed with soy-based ink. And there will be no thick paper user manual offered with the phone. Reclaim’s charger is also Energy Star approved to meet efficiency standards.

Sprint said it has established a set of environmental design criteria for future devices and accessories.

See Also:

• Eco-Friendly Motorola Phone Finds a Telecom Carrier
• Incentive to Recycle Tech Gadgets
• Who’s Recycling Techno Trash?

Photo: Samsung Reclaim/Sprint

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.]

We’ve been asked not to reveal the URLs, but we can assure you we’ve seen this official support screen pictured above with our own two eyes, which means that the HTC Hero is all but confirmed in a juicy CDMA blend for Sprint. How (or if) that’ll affect the availability of the US 3G version unlocked or on any carrier is unclear, but given Hesse’s huffy language regarding Pre exclusivity, we wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve got this one locked down for a while as well. We’ve seen a similar support page for an Alltel-branded Snap, so if you’re still tied up in one of the carrier’s legacy divested markets and you’ve been pining after the Snap (and Ozone) on Sprint and Verizon, fear not — your own version is on the way. We’ll admit, if you had asked us a few months back what American carrier would get HTC’s highest-end Android phone to date, Sprint wouldn’t have been our first guess — but hey, good for them. If you can’t win the coverage battle against the Big Red juggernaut, may as well try to win the exclusive hardware battle, right?

[Thanks, Adam]

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

HTC support site reveals Hero for Sprint, Snap for Alltel originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Aug 2009 17:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Clearwire Communications announced that it will launch CLEAR 4G in eight cities in Texas, as well as Boise, Idaho and Bellingham, Wash. on September 1st. The eight Texas markets include Abilene, Amarillo, Corpus Christi, Lubbock, Midland/Odessa, Killeen/Temple, Waco and Wichita Falls.

A Sprint spokesperson confirmed that Sprint’s own 4G rollout will mirror these on the same day. Meanwhile, Sprint will switch on Sprint 4G for Las Vegas, Atlanta, and Portland sometime this month.

Clearwire, meanwhile, said in a statement that it’s working to activate service later in 2009 in Chicago, Dallas, Honolulu, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Charlotte. Unfortunately, New York, Boston, San Francisco, and D.C. will have to wait until 2010.

While we wait for all the carriers to get on board with nixing their endless, unhelpful voicemail pre-beep messages, we’ve already got instructions from Sprint on how to disable it for your own particular voicemail box on that network.

It’s pretty easy:

1. Call your voicemail
2. At the menu, press 3 for personal options
3. Press 2 for greeting
4. Press 1 to change the greeting
5. To enable / disable the instructions, press 3

Trust us, we did some serious searching for similar instructions on the other major carriers, but had no luck. If you know of anything, let us know!

Update: Thanks to some helpful comments we’ve got instructions for AT&T and Verizon for lopping off bits of the message, and, in Verizon’s case, speeding up the talking. Check ’em out after the break. Consider yourselves upgraded to orange, guys!

Continue reading Take Back the Beep: how to disable voicemail instructions on Sprint (updated!)

Filed under: Cellphones

Take Back the Beep: how to disable voicemail instructions on Sprint (updated!) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 31 Jul 2009 17:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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