When consumers are asked if they feel guilty when they don’t by a green gadget, 60% feel no guilt at all a Retrevo Pulse study has revealed.  42% said they didn’t care if the gadget they bought was green or not.  16% would ignore green for a good price.  Yet, 40% of respondents indicated they do consider green when gadget shopping.  That’s only 2 in 5 shoppers who consider the environment when gadget shopping.

Many would imagine younger generations were more green-aware, but this appears not to be the case.  While 80% indicated they trust Energy Star ratings on products, only 36% of young respondents (under 25) actually consider energy ratings when making a purchase decision.  55% of those over 25 years of age do consider energy ratings.  

60% said they had knowledge of how to be green with gadgets, yet over half of those didn’t always put this knowledge into practice.  The motivating factor to turn consumers green was good old-fashioned American green, money that is.  Over 50% said tax or cash incentives would make them greener shoppers.

The study seems to indicate that consumers are well educated about purchasing green gadgets, but most don’t put this knowledge into practice.  The results suggest that industry and governments need to intervene and make green choices better by making less green options more expensive.

More information on the study can be found at Retrevo’s website.

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According to the BBC, the UK currently recycles just 3% of portable batteries and this legislation aims to raise that figure to 45% by 2016.

The recycling bins would be emptied free of charge, but many are skeptical whether consumers will be aware of the new rules or if they would go to the effort of returning batteries to stores.

Legislation like this puts responsibility on merchants.  If forces those who sell products to accept some responsibility for where those products end up.  Merchant schemes are only part of the solution and for that reason this scheme may fail to deliver.  Manufacturers, retailers, and consumers must all be complicit for a substantial impact to be seen.  While many individuals will recycle at home, but few venture out of their own backyard to recycle, unless it involves preventing a hefty landfill fee.  A first step would be better promotion to ensure consumers are aware that this program exists.  Education is part of the solution when it comes to changing peoples habits. 

There are parallels with the plastic-bag recycling facilities being offered at many grocery stores.  In most places it isn’t legislated that grocery stores offer this service, but it is a method for grocery stores to clear their own conscious.  Many of those bins sit empty and unused.  If you bring plastic bags to a grocery store, then why would you not just reuse them rather than put them into a recycling bin, walking around the counter and getting more only to put them back in the recycling bin on your next trip.  

Ireland may be an exception in the success of plastic bag recycling and this model would likely work better for batteries too.  In Ireland the use of plastic bags is legislated.  Ireland has imposed a “plastax” consumption fee on plastic bags since March 2002 where individuals pay at 15 cent fee for each plastic bag consumed at checkout.  This resulted in a 90% drop in plastic bag consumption, or approximately 1 billion fewer bags used annually.   This changed retailer and consumer behavior together: consumers used less bags and as a result retailers were required to stock less bags and could sell more reusable bags to consumers.

For the EU battery recycling program to succeed, it needs a similar consumer motivator.  A battery tax on disposable batteries might a better incentive.  Consumers would hopefully buy rechargeable batteries instead, and as a result retailers would sell more battery chargers and reduce the number of disposable batteries being shipped and stored.

 The EPBA is 

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Ah, late July. The perfect time for a
little R&R. And whether that’s on the back porch, in the back yard, or in
the back woods you just might want a little music to help you relax. But you
have to admit, hanging out outdoors with your headphones on kind of defeats the
purpose to soaking in the environment. Trouble is your iPod barely has enough
juice to keep itself going, let alone crank out tunage on some dinky speakers.
And if you’re anywhere but next to the house chances are a power outlet ain’t
exactly at arms length. But don’t get out that extension cord just yet.
Consider first these nifty Solar Powered Portable Speakers.

Designed to work with most music phones as
well as iPods, iPhones, and mp3 players this solar powered sound system means
you can cut the cord and keep the music. The built-in rechargeable battery
soaks up the suns rays and provides a return of up to 8 hours of music for 6
hours tanning time. Not only is such a device ideal for a trip to the cottage
but it’s small enough and light enough to toss in with your camping gear should
you want to leave the trappings of this modern world behind but not your Boz
Scaggs.

Now, admittedly these speakers aren’t going
to be busting ear drums or pulling in noise complaints. But given its
portability, usability, and rechargeability this system has a lot of
capability. The fact that the manufacturers went to the lengths of supporting
additional music phones like Sony Ericcson, Nokia, and Samsung makes these speakers all the more useful.

Specs:

USB cable

3.5mm to 3.5mm audio cable (headphone jack)

Sony Ericsson Fast Port / Nokia 2.5mm stereo and Samsung 20pin (G600)

Technical Specifications

Amp Power: 1W x 2

Output Power: 2w x 2w RMS

Dimensions: 195mm x 112mm x 50mm (l x w x
h)

Rechargeable Battery: 1000 mAh Li-ion

Battery Running/Charge Time: Up to 8 hours play time for 6 hours charge

Weight: 290g

Packaged in environmentally-friendly
materials

Source

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Normally I try to avoid posting on concepts
mainly because they rarely materialize into real world products, no matter how
much we wish they would. But this following concept isn’t just a great idea, it
has great potential as well. In a nutshell, designer Chiyu Chen envisions a
fleet of publicly available hybrid bicycles that passively harvest the kinetic
energy of braking (definitely unlike that generator-light that doubles the
power needed to turn the damn pedal). When a bike is returned to a station the
stored energy is then fed into the city’s power grid and the user’s public transit
account is credited. The user can then use said credit to ride the subway and
bus system. Talk about sustainability!

The whole setup is called Hybrid2, which
relies on the proprietary ‘Hybrake’ regenerative braking system to collect
power. Ideally the plan calls for a proportionate remuneration of time spent
biking and time on public transit. Credit would be handled by RFID card readers
at the stations that would recognize personal ID cards to lock and unlock
bikes, as well as keep track of energy collected and transit credit. 

Source

MIT Tracks Trash

Do you every wonder where your garbage
goes? Well, MIT does as they are currently dedicating resources and research
into ‘Project Trash Track’ (if you ask me they should have diverted some funds
to the English department to come up with a better project name). By employing
tracking tags researchers at MIT are monitoring the incredible journey of
various kinds of waste in both New
York and Seattle. Rather than
simply analyzing costs the project will also inform residents about where their
trash is going and what it had to go through to get there. Residents of Toronto certainly
don’t need that level of sophistication as Canada’s
largest city passes into month two of their citywide garbage strike. However,
given the public outcry in over the temporary dump-sites in the city, tracking
larger patterns may help inform consumers that their trash doesn’t simply
vaporize in the back of the garbage truck.

Source

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Overview

The Rundown: The HTC Hero really wants to
be your saviour from iPhone clones and, if you’re not a fan, the iPhone. So let’s
give it the benefit of the doubt and start off with the pros. The Hero
immediately strikes you as a new breed of cell phone. Gone are the tired tropes
of symmetrical blocks and nondescript shapes. You can tell the Hero just from
its silhouette. Its slim, rectangular form juts out at the end, presenting you
with the trackball and a back/search rocker button. The result is a distinct
look that is ergonomically pleasing. The crisp 480×320 screen is multi-touch
capable and such double digit functionality is well implemented, providing
fluent pinch zooming from photo-viewing to web-browsing. It supports a slew of media files, both audio and video, and with a 3.5mm jack you can pop in your favourite headphones (unlike some other brands). And then there’s the
camera.

And we’re into the cons. You’d think with
the potency of a 5 megapixel camera HTC would have integrated it better. For
instance, taking photos with the camera held sideways and having to push down
the trackball is just awkward. Add to that the significant time between
depressing the button and the photo actually taking, no flash and the rather
mediocre picture quality and you have one underperforming 5 megapixel camera.

As for the user interface, it’s sleek, clean, and
surprisingly robust. A real testament to what HTC has been able to accomplish
with Android. However, behind the sleek exterior is an underpowered interior
and with a paltry 288MB of RAM backing up the 588MHz processor, resulting in one sluggish interface. At times the delays in response time are several seconds,
a problem compounded by the number of widgets you have running.

The Bottom Line: The HTC Hero is sleek,
intuitive, and unique but it just doesn’t have the horsepower to excel paste
the others in its class.

Specs:

Processor: Qualcomm®
MSM7200A™, 528 MHz

Operating System: Android™

Memory: ROM:
512 MB

RAM: 288 MB

Dimensions: (LxWxT)    112 x 56.2 x 14.35 mm ( 4.41 x 2.21 x 0.57 inches)

Weight: 135
grams ( 4.76 ounces) with battery

Display: 3.2-inch
TFT-LCD touch-sensitive screen with 320×480 HVGA resolution

Network          HSPA/WCDMA:

900/2100 MHz

Up to 2 Mbps up-link and 7.2 Mbps down-link
speeds

Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE:

850/900/1800/1900 MHz

(Band frequency and data speed are operator
dependent.)

Device Control: Trackball with Enter button

GPS: Internal
GPS antenna

Connectivity: Bluetooth® 2.0 with Enhanced Data Rate and A2DP for wireless
stereo headsets

Wi-Fi®: IEEE 802.11 b/g

HTC ExtUSB™ (11-pin mini-USB 2.0 and audio
jack in one)

3.5 mm audio jack

Camera: 5.0
megapixel color camera with auto focus

Audio supported formats: MP3, AAC(AAC, AAC+, AAC-LC), AMR-NB,
WAV, MIDI and Windows Media® Audio 9

Video supported formats: MPEG-4, H.263, H.264 and Windows
Media® Video 9

Battery Rechargeable Lithium-ion
battery

Capacity: 1350 mAh

Talk time:

Up to 420 minutes for WCDMA

Up to 470 minutes for GSM

Standby time:

Up to 750 hours for WCDMA

Up to 440 hours for GSM

(The above are subject to network and phone
usage.)

Expansion Slot  microSD™ memory card (SD 2.0 compatible)

AC Adapter: Voltage
range/frequency: 100 ~ 240V AC, 50/60 Hz

DC output: 5V and 1A

Special Features:

G-sensor

Digital Compass

Source

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Overview: What has more megapixels than the
average digital camera, excellent call quality, and can play music? The Sony
Ericsson C905a.

The Rundown: Cell phone camera aficionados
rejoice as Sony has released another whopper of a hybrid in the Ericsson C905a. However, in a twist, they’ve honed in on a carrier and are offering this silver wunderkind
exclusively through AT&T. This means a lower price ($179.99) but a locked phone
that tethers you to a 2-year contract.

The phone itself is sleek looking though
rather mundane, especially since it only comes in silver. That being said, you
aren’t going to be buying this phone for its looks, for as mother always said,
it’s what’s inside that counts. With a powerful 8.1 megapixel camera,
auto-focus, stabilization and 16x digital zoom the C905a is leaps and bounds
ahead of your average cell phone camera and near the top of the pack when it
comes to pocket-sized picture quality. What’s more the 2.4-inch 320×240 screen does a
magnificent job of displaying your pictures.

But Sony’s also packed a slew of other
features including turn-by-turn voice guided GPS, FM tuner, MusicID (for track
recognition), as well as MP3, WMA, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+ support. And so it’s too
bad that Sony insists on making you use their proprietary headset by omitting
the 3.5mm jack.And on the theme of proprietary, the memory expansion is also relegated to Sony’s Memory Stick Micro line of cards. And while the built-in 93MB should provide ample amateur storage, you should also consider that increased picture quality means a proportionate decrease in storage capacity.

The Bottom Line: A feature-infused phone
that if it doesn’t have you sold on the 8.1 megapixel camera should have you
looking elsewhere

Specs:

Battery

Talk time: Up to 3.5 hours

Standby time: Up to 14.6 days

Dimensions

Weight: 4.8 ounces

Size (inches): 4.09 x 1.93 x 0.71 inches

Memory

Internal memory storage: 93 MB

Expandable memory storage: 8 GB

Memory format: Memory Stick Micro(TM)

Wireless Technology

GSM/GPRS850/900/1800/1900 MHz

3G850/1900/2100 MHz

EDGE high speed data network

BLUETOOTH® technology2.0, A2DP

Display

Display size: 2.4 inches

Resolution (pixels): 320 x 240

Keyboard

Predictive text for fast typing

Source

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Musgrave refers to those
manufacturers that feign sustainability as ‘greenwashers.’ They
would be the ones slapping ineffective solar panels on obscure devices or
working a minute amount of bamboo into a product to convey a sense of
environmental conscience. It’s a pet peeve of mine and we’re seeing it more
and more these days as companies scramble to convey the politically correct
impression of a sustainable market. To rectify this heinous trend Musgrave
proposes a ‘green unit’ to measure the actual attention to sustainability of
the product. Ideally such a unit, printed on the side of packaging, would
function in the same way miles per gallon betrays fuel efficiency. You can call
the new Ford F150 the ‘most fuel efficient pickup ever’ but the mpg will reveal
just how efficient that is.

The trouble, however, is how one measures
sustainability. The scope could range from simply grading the materials
contained in the product to monitoring the power consumption of the factories
and docking points for workers who don’t commute. You could even then expand
the scope, taking a factories geographical location into account and computing
the environmental impact on the basis of longitude and latitude. But then of
course you’re getting into political issues. Ideally consumers would buy the
‘greenest’ products but I think one could make the case that if we’re going to
be environmentally sound we should do the same on the humanitarian front as
well. After all, North America has been clothed in the fruits of underpayed labour for ages. Or
how about we consolidate the whole thing into an ‘ethical unit’ and adopt the
scales of justice as the symbol. Five scales and you’re in the moral clear.

Sarcasm aside, being environmentally sound
is an ethical issue and as consumers it’s our responsibility to educate
ourselves on what is moral and immoral. If companies see consumers making
informed choices they will, invariably, adjust accordingly. And if we pressure
them to disclose their practices, be it on their treatment of employees or their
environmental sustainability, then we just might get the answers we’re looking
for. But those answers cannot be reduced to a few checkmarks or bamboo icons on
the side of some package. By that logic the most environmentally heinous of
companies could also be the manufacturer of the ‘greenest’ product. Buy a
sustainable lamp, fund illegitimate oil refineries.

No, the greatest combatant to environmental
recklessness is not some five-star grading scale. It’s an informed consumer.

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Priced at a mere $499 the T91 is an
8.9-inch touchscreen tablet running on an Intel Atom Z520 with 1GB of RAM. Its
16GB SSD might seem to be on the low end but such restrictions inevitably keep
the T91 at its bargain price. Another area where the T91 seems a bit dated is
in the OS department. Asus has decided to go with a slightly modified version
of Windows XP Home. The results are mixed.

There is a nifty Mac-esque launcher but it
can only hold up to five icons before you’re forced to ‘unlock’ more apps via a
slider, limiting what should enhance functionality and accessibility. The T91
does add some touch-oriented software with a drawing application, as well as
other mundane apps for photos and internet radio. However, there is an added
benefit to such limited offerings. The performance of the T91 is noticeably
high. It’s responsive to the touch and accurate to the stylus strokes. And the
apps run with nary a hiccup.

Ultimately, if you’re in the market for a
touchscreen tablet the T91 should only come up on your radar if your budget ceiling
is $500. One thing to consider is given that it’s running XP the internet is
awash with compatible apps, some of which like RKLauncher and RocketDock could
easily be used to replace the more limited apps packaged with the tablet. Otherwise,
you’re better off looking at tablets that reflect current generation
technology, especially with Windows 7 around the corner and its promise of
increased touch functionality and integration.

Asus Eee T91 (including full stats)

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“What do you listen to your Dire Straits on?”

“Duh, on my Walkman.”

2009:

“What do you listen to your Coldplay on?”

“Duh, on my iPod.”

Times are certainly a-changin’. It wasn’t
all that long ago that ‘cassette tapes’ (a plastic cartridge with a spool of
magnetic tape inside) were the format du jour and if you were on the go chances
are they were being played on a Sony Walkman. Then music files were digitized
and the portable music player market was cracked wide open. Over a decade later
the king of the hill is assuredly Apple and their ubiquitous iPod. But there
are those that remain loyal to that brand that got them through some tough
times (and by tough times I mean the 80s). And Sony has in turn rewarded that
loyalty, updating the brand over the years. The latest additions include the
sleek, suave Walkman E series and the diminutive, ultra-compact Walkman B
series.

The E series is certainly the more
attractive of the additions. With a 2-inch QVGA colour LCD screen this ain’t
your daddy’s Walkman. On top of displaying track information and album art, the
screen can also be used for video playback, though at these dimensions it’s
more of an added bonus than a selling point.

Sony has also put some work into sound
quality, with the E series sporting their patented ‘Clear Audio’ package, which
reduces sound leakage and improved bass without the distortion. For you
audiophiles there’s also a 5-band equalizer and a dynamic normalize to balance
the volume between songs. It also has an FM tuner with built-in recording
software so you can get the latest Black Eyed Peas without dropping a dime (in
your face internet music pirates!)

For those that wonder how you get music on
a portable device that doesn’t rely on iTunes, the Walkmen E series makes use
of a ‘drag and drop’ system. Apparently, you just click files and ‘drop’ them
right onto the device. Apple should really look into this new technology. But
if you’re an iTunes junkie you can also sync up your Walkman with iTunes 8.1 via
the Content Transfer software.

The E series provides 30 hours of audio/6
hours of video playback on a single charge. At the moment it has no pricing or
storage info.

As for the Walkman B, it is essentially a
rebuttal to the iPod Shuffle with its small form design. One area where it
attempts to get the leg up is track searching in a menu-less environment. To
that end Sony has developed ZAPPIN:

“It’s also the first B series WALKMAN® that
simplifies music searches when you need to focus on other activities like
sports. ZAPPIN™ is a unique Sony feature that plays a few
instantly-recognisable seconds from within each song. It’s a great alternative
to conventional track searches, where it’s often hard to identify a song from
the opening few bars.”

Additional B series features:

• Small, Ultra-light
player in choice of four colours

• Easy operation with
drag-and-drop file transfers

• ZAPPIN™ for quick,
easy song searches

• Bass button for
powerful low frequency enhancement

• 18 hr music playback
and Quick Charge battery

• FM tuner with
recording facility

Despite the lack of pricing info both will
be available at the end of July.

Source

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At its most basic PecoBOO uses a
rudimentary form of facial detection via a webcam to determine whether you’re
present or not. This is not to be confused with facial recognition which analysis facial characteristics to detect
identity. Rather this software determines whether or not someone is sitting in
front of the computer and it’s fully configurable. PecoBOO allows you to set:

Range—how far away a person can sit to be
considered ‘using’ the computer

Sample Rate—how often the software checks
for your presence, scalable between a half second to two seconds

Idle Time—how long before energy saving
options are enabled

Mode—choose between ‘Hibernate,’ ‘Sleep,’
and ‘Stay Awake’

Off Time—how long you want these options to
be in effect for

Given the more active capabilities of
PecoBOO the company recommends that you disable your other energy saving
software to prevent interference.

The software itself comes from VeryPC.
“Ecology, Economy, Performance” is the slogan for this U.K.
computer company, who’ve made it their business to make your business greener.
And PecoBOO could very well be the next step forward in energy saving solutions
as it takes the guess work out of automatic ‘sleep’ and ‘hibernate’ commands.
Though some with invariably be turned off by the thought of an ever-present and
watchful eye, even though it’s an eco-minded one.

PecoBOO is available for XP and Vista users. It is included
with every VeryPC computer as well as available in the U.K. with
the purchase of a webcam.

 PecoBoo via Source

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