An Open Letter to Nicholas Negroponte & Jeff Bezos

Dear Nicholas and Jeff,

If you haven’t done so already, you two should do a project together. Here’s one to consider if you’re up for it.

Jeff, nice job on The Daily Show a couple of weeks ago. You probably know that Nicholas has been delivering inexpensive, rugged, wireless enabled laptops to children in the developing world. A worthy cause indeed.

Nicholas, I am forever grateful to you for launching Wired. I’m sure you know all about Jeff and Amazon’s Kindle product line. The new Kindle 2 stores up 1,500 books and can go without being recharged for up to 2 weeks. That’s not bad either.

Jeff’s got the product and Nicholas has the distribution system. Sure, you’d have to strip down the Kindle and modify it to hold up against the dust, dirt and heat of the developing world, but the OLPC team has already solved those problems.

Nicholas, don’t get me wrong, I love the OLPC – I even purchased one for myself as part of your “Give 1, Get 1” promotion (then I donated it back to you). But reading and access to books is where educations starts. Computing can follow when you sort out all these nasty political games going on with chip makers and software companies.

Jeff, selling Kindle 2’s to wealthy American’s is nice and all, but think of all those needy kids you could help by putting a book – or 1,500 – in their hands. If that doesn’t convince you, then think of it this way. If you can’t read, you can’t shop at Amazon.

Good luck guys.

Will

Another Solar Cell Phone

Following up on my post from yesterday, China’s handset maker ZTE rolled out a $40 solar cell phone. The Coral-200 delivers 15 minutes of talk time for every hour of sunlight which is comparable to Samsung’s Blue Earth.

ZTE is partnering with Digicel, a network provider targeting emerging markets, to offer the phone in parts of the world that are off the grid. Certainly, some technology has more social value than others. Laptops broaden educational opportunities for children. But I’m not sure that cell phones offer much social value. Maybe in fascilitating business and therefore raising the standard of living? Any thouoghts?

Via EcoGeek

It’s a start…Samsung’s Blue Earth Solar Cell Phone

Last week Samsung unveiled the Blue Earth cell phone at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The new cell phone features solar panels to charge it’s battery. Ten minutes of sun will yield a 3 minute call – not great, but perhaps not bad in those circumstances when you wish you had your power cord or an extra battery to make that last phone call.

A reader on EcoGeek commented that “I’m not sure about the solar panel, as my phone tends to be somewhere dark most of the time (e.g. a pocket or bag), and isn’t really going to get any light at all…”

That’s a really good point, but I like to compare this phone to the first solar calculators – devices which also spend most of their time in the dark. Of course, a cell phone is much more energy intensive, but it’s a start..and in the not too distant future we’ll see small solar panels and battery life improve. Or maybe, an external panel is the answer, one you wear or that’s actually woven into your clothes. In that case I guess it’s not really a solar phone anymore. Nevertheless, Blue Earth is the kind of product hat gets people thinking – and that’s what’s really important.

Now the bad news. Since Blue Earth is really a concept phone I don’t expect it’ll have a very long useful life before it’s replaced by something better and potentially winds up as ewaste. So I’d like to see Samsung own up to this with a take back program for early adopters and a promise to see that Blue Earth cell phones are responsibly recycled. Now that would make the Blue Earth a Greener cell phone.

Via EcoGeek