Eco-friendly

NEW YORK--Green is the new black in wireless as companies like Sprint Nextel and Samsung announce new products and programs geared toward environmental sustainability.

At a press event Thursday at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum here, the companies announced a new eco-friendly device called the Reclaim and an overall strategy to green the wireless market.

The news comes as consumers are increasingly buying products and services based on environmental sustainability. From energy-saving light bulbs to hybrid cars and now environmentally-friendly cell phones, green is all the rage.

For Sprint, which has been plagued by a poor customer service reputation for … Read more

Earth Day may or may not appeal to your eco-conscience, but keeping the reins steady on your computer's carbon footprint and energy consumption makes good technological and financial sense. Reducing your energy output can prolong the life of your hardware--especially a laptop or Netbook--and can help save cash, which we all know is the 'greenest' motivation around.

This collection of environmentally friendly software lassos together these apps, plus a few others to help understand and appreciate our planet's cities, flora, and outer space neighbors.

ENERGY-SAVERS

Edison

Edison for XP and Windows Vista is the newest one-stop app for monitoring how much energy and money you save when you tighten up your computer's sleep and shutdown schedules. A slider lets you decide after how many minutes you want to shut down your computer's display and hard drive during the peak work day. You can program differing criteria for off hours. Manual customization is also possible if you need to ease into greener computing.… Read more

So what kind of car are you going to get next? Perhaps, I might tempt your credulity by asking you to consider a new eco-car called the LEKO.

A Toyota? No, an IKEA.

A strange Web site has appeared, roulez-leko.com, on which a very relaxed, modern, eco-friendly chap, allegedly the great car designer Christophe Grozs, stands next to an apparent car draped with the word LEKO and the tagline "la voiture selon IKEA."

Yes, the car according to IKEA.

The LEKO (L'eco, get it?), allegedly has the backing of the World Wildlife Fund in France. Which might mean the fund has put money into the creation or that the car will have plastic panda-skin seats.

It also will save you untold (because unspecified) amounts of money on your expenditure. And it is humongously eco-friendly.

This is an ad, right?

If IKEA made a car, the doors might not fit quite perfectly into the body. Then you'd really have to work hard to use those tiny screwdrivers to make sure the engine didn't wobble. And just imagine the number of screws it would take to put in the cup holder.

There's the name too. Real IKEA product names never make sense. They always seem to resemble a fair to middling Scrabble hand--for example, KLIPPAN or LYCKSELE. LEKO is far too meaningful.… Read more

Sure, PMA was lots of fun, but there was plenty of other stuff going on here at Crave this week. Here's some of the best and some of the worst.

• We took a look at the new 24-inch iMacs from Apple--and liked what we saw.

• We brought you news of "trashy" lingerie made from recycled materials. We won't tell if you click.

• Strangely, it seems Amazon wants to help the iPhone be the Kindle killer with its own Kindle app. It works, but there's some strangeness.

• We can rebuild him: Meet the quasi-bionic eye camera. … Read more

Dell finally throws its hat into the whole green computer monitor trend, and of course by green I mean eco-friendly.

Thursday, Dell announced its brand new, aptly named G series of displays, which includes the 22-inch G2210 and the 24-inch G2410. Each monitor includes light-emitting diode (LED) backlighting and is made from recycled material.

Each display has a purported contrast ratio of 1000:1. Now, Dell states that each display achieves a significantly higher dynamic contrast ratio, but If you know how vendors determine dynamic contrast ratio numbers, then you know how meaningless they can be. So I won't … Read more

A few years ago, concerns about packaging waste and my carbon footprint prompted me to abandon single-use plastic water bottles in favor of a reusable Nalgene bottle. But then, concerns about exposure to BPA prompted me to switch to a Sigg. Still, I don't care much for drinking out of aluminum, and I don't find the Sigg designs all that appealing.

If only the Kor Hydration Vessel ($30) was around when I was looking for a replacement bottle. Inspired by the look of blown glass, the 750ml bottle is made of BPA-free plastic with an integrated handle. At … Read more

So you wanna save the Earth, huh? You've got two options: you can visit the Surya nightclub in London and dance on its electricity-generating dance floor, or you can buy an LG Flatron W2252TE monitor.

It might sound like some sort of futuristic tank, but the W2252TE, which we first told you about in June, is reportedly the world's most eco-friendly monitor. LG reckons it sucks just 22W in use and as little as 0.3W in standby mode.

We tested these claims, and to our delight, it drew just 18.8W in use and less than 0.… Read more