Samsung has launched its eco-friendly phone Blue Earth (SCH-W940) in South Korea. Its the first solar charging phone for Korea and boasts lots of other eco-friendly things that should make environmentalists proud.

The phone’s packaging is made from eco-friendly materials, has 25 percent more efficient charger and is free from materials like Brominated Flame Retardants (BFR), Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) and Phthalate.

As for its solar charging capabilities, the phone can give a talk time of up to 10 mins on a solar charge of around 1 hour.

Other features include 3-inch screen with Eco UI, 3MP camera, DMB, Bluetooth and more.

It will arrive on SK Telecom for 600,000 won (US$518).

Samsung had promised to launch its environmental friendly Blue Earth device this month and here it is. Blue Earth’s name and design inspiration is derived by our planet’s clean and pure look from the space, just like a blue marble. For nature caring consumers, Samsung has not only used environmental friendly materials for the phone, the phone’s charger and packaging also support the environment caring concern. Blue Earth is made from Post Consumer Material (PCM), which is extracted from water bottles and is free from materials like Brominated Flame Retardants (BFR), Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) and Phthalate.

There’s an Eco Mode inside the phone, which when activated adjusts the screen brightness, backlight duration and Bluetooth settings to maintain energy efficiency. Eco Walk is nothing but a built-in pedometer that counts the user steps and calculates the reduction in CO2 emission realized by walking.

Other eco-friendly things you’ll find are a solar panel capable to charge via sunlight, a 5 star energy efficiency charger using only 0.03W power during standby mode and the box created out of recycled paper and printed in soy ink that can be later transformed into a photo frame or pencil box.

Internal features are quite good compared to other eco-friendly phones. Blue Earth features a 3-inch capacitive touchscreen, 3.6Mbps HSDPA, 3.2MP camera, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and microSD card slot (up to 16GB).

Samsung will launch the Blue Earth in Sweden this month followed later by France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Portugal and other European and Asian countries.

Full Specifications:

Network: HSDPA 3.6 Mbps 900/2100, EDGE/GPRS850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
Display: 16M WQVGA TFT LCD (3.0”) Capacitive Touch Screen
Camera: 3.2 Megapixel CMOS, Face Detection / Smile Shot / Photo Editor
Audio: Audio Format Support (MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, WMA) / WMDRM, OMA DRM, Find Music (Music Recognition) / Music Equalizer, Stereo FM Radio with RDS, Bluetooth Stereo Headset (A2DP)
Video: Video Format Support (H.263, WMV, MPEG4), QVGA @ 15 fps Video Recording & Playing
Eco Friendly Features: Solar Charging Panel, PCM from used water bottles, BFR, PVC, Phthalate Free, Eco-Mode, Eco-Walk, Eco- Calendar, Eco-Tips, 5 star eco charger / Charger reminder, Eco-friendly and reusable Packaging
Connectivity: Bluetoothv 2.1 / USB 2.0 HS / Wi-Fi
Internal Memory : 130MB
External Memory : microSDHC (up to 16GB)
Dimension: 108 x 53.6 x 14.2 mm
Weight: 119 g
Battery: 1080 mAh

Samsung’s second solar phone Blue Earth (S7550) will be out in a couple of months. At an event in San Francisco, Samsung was showing its eco-friendly devices and Blue Earth had an October 2009 date tagged below it.

Blue Earth as I said will be Samsung’s second solar offering but the major difference between Solar Guru aka Crest (E1107) and Blue Earth is the integration of various features like touchscreen display, TouchWiz UI, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS, camera etc. The phone is said to give about 10 minutes of talk time on a 1 hour of solar charge.

The pricing and region availability is not known.

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CNET Asia was lucky enough to get their hands on a working prototype of the Blue Earth phone that was announced in February this year at the MWC. However, since the hands-on seems to be in a room, we weren’t able to know how its solar charging works but it promises to give up to 10 mins of talktime on a 1 hour charging, similar to Crest aka Solar Guru.

According to CNET, the phone is expected to be announced later this year.

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Samsung today announced its phone lineup to be showcased at the CTIA. Its booth has a Touch for Every Lifestyle theme, clearly emphasizing on touchscreen based phones. Amongst the phones, Samsung plans to display the UltraTouch series, Impression, Memoir, Behold, Eternity, Omnia, Blue Earth and the Instinct S30.

The only thing we know for now is that Instinct’s follow up, the Intinct S30 sports a 3.2-inch screen along with a luxurious design. Rest of the details will mostly be revealed at the showfloor tomorrow.

Samsung just announced Blue Earth phone which is by far the greenest phone I have seen. The touchscreen phone has a solar panel at the back which is used to charge the phone. Apart from being solar powered, Samsung has not used any environment harming components. The handset is made from PCM recycled plastic that is extracted from water bottles.

The concrete specs are still awaited but a few software features add to its environment friendly tag. The phone can be used in ‘eco mode’ which adjusts the screen brightness, backlight duration and Bluetooth to energy efficient settings and there’s an app called ‘eco-walk’ that counts the number of steps and shows how much trees the user has saved.

Blue Earth will be at MWC and we are pretty excited to see how this phone turns out to be. As for the launch, it will come in second half of 2009.

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