In an effort to encourage consumers to save electricity, Nokia has launched phones with alerts informing users to unplug the charger once the battery is full.
Nokia decided to put the alerts into mass markets products first to help maximize the potential energy savings. Mobile phones sounding a beep and displaying an alert - "Battery is full, please unplug the charger" - could save enough electricity to power 85,000 homes annually, Nokia said.
The unplug alerts are set to first appear on its 1200, 1208 and 1650 phone models with later handhelds to follow, targeting fast growing markets like India, China and Latin America.
Kirsi Sormunen, Vice-President of Environmental Affairs at Nokia said, "Around two-thirds of the energy used by a mobile phone is lost when it is unplugged after charging but the charger itself is left in a live socket. We want to reduce this waste and are working on reducing to an absolute minimum the amount of energy our chargers use. The new alerts also play an important role, encouraging people to help us in this goal by unplugging their chargers."
The alerts are the latest in a series of energy saving initiatives from Nokia. The phone maker had agreed with other mobile industry companies on measures to reduce energy consumption and pollution as a project in partnership with the European Commission. By 2010 it aims to have reduced by an additional 50% the amount of electricity a charger consumes whilst still plugged into the mains but not the phone.
