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"Battery full - please unplug your charger"
According to the Energy Saving Trust, UK consumers' penchant for leaving their mobile phone chargers turned on at all times is costing them £47m a year and leading to 250,000 tonnes of unnecessary carbon emissions.
But mobile phone manufacturer Nokia thinks it may have come up with an innovative and refreshingly simple answer to this thorny problem.
According to Nokia's director of environmental affairs, Markus Terho, next year will see the launch of a major energy efficiency drive by the company that will see all new phones include a standard reminder on the display alongside the battery charged message reminding users to unplug their charger.
"We know customers want to see more action from company's to help them reduce their environmental impact," he said. "Alongside work to reduce the energy consumed by our chargers we also think this reminder will prove effective."
It will be interesting to see if the kind of users already too distracted or lazy to turn off their chargers will respond to a written message on their phone screen. But Nokia is to be applauded for trying to find a simple solution to the problem and if it works effectively the company may have uncovered an effective solution to the problem while it continues to enhance the efficiency of its chargers.
Of course, what would be better would be a charger that switched itself off automatically, or at least consumed less power when not charging a phone.
I'm not sure how this would work in practice - there'd need to be a way of detecting when a phone was actually plugged in - but surely an innovative company like Nokia could come up with a solution?
Posted by :Peter Parkes | December 1, 2006 3:51 PM
What if the charger itself told you if it was not charging anymore?
Posted by :Jan Willem | December 5, 2006 8:11 PM
Surely we're all missing the point. The point is that people should take responsibility for their actions rather than waiting for technology to take that responsibility away. It's the same with monitors. How much effort does it take a person to hit the power button? Now I don't what what the calorific value is, but I bet it's a lot less energy than a monitor consumes when it's running a screensaver.
It's time we stopped using technology as a cure to our own laziness.
Posted by :Tony Williams | December 8, 2006 4:30 PM
Cool!http://www.chinawholesalegift.com/Mobile-Phone-Gifts-and-Accessories/Emergency-Mobile-Charger/
Posted by :wholesale | December 10, 2006 12:56 AM
I'd say it was technology's job to make life easier for us — not that that excuses laziness, of course, but I think there's an opportunity for innovation here.
Posted by :Peter Parkes | December 14, 2006 4:51 PM
Yes Peter, I agree, let's just sit down and keep living as we do now, waiting for the sacro-saint god called technology solves everything. So let's keep using planes like hell until a banana powered fuel comes up, live electricity switched on all the time until floors sense their is no-one and switch them off, get bigger and bigger cars until fuel cells are pervasive, etc... When we'll be walking in T-shirt and swimming pants for X-Mas (not a distant dream judging by the weather outside) we'll be able to know who the culprit was: technology not the user
Posted by :herve | December 20, 2006 1:35 PM
I'm looking to contact Markus Terho if anybody knows contact details regarding a suggestion to a further artical in the paper about the same subject.
Truely believe Eco-friendly is the future just wish more people would take it serious.
Regards
Nathan Gladwell
nathan-gladwell@hotmail.co.uk
Posted by :Nathan Gladwell | January 12, 2007 7:22 PM