Hands-on the LG Remarq

As soon as the show floor opened at CTIA, we dashed over to the LG booth to take a look at its new eco-friendly phone, the LG Remarq. LG boasts that the Remarq is made of 19 percent recycled plastic and 87 percent of its parts are recyclable once you decide to get rid of it. According to LG, it has lowered the levels of polyvinyl chloride and brominated flame retardants in the phone, and they took care to make the packaging environmentally-friendly as well. The Remarq's charger earns high marks for energy efficiency too, and is an Energy Star certified product.

Interestingly, it also comes with something called an Eco Calculator that will help you measure your carbon footprint. For example, you can enter in the number of hours you walk or cycle,  and it'll tell you how many pounds of CO2 you're potentially saving (or how many plants that could be planted). There's also an option to find out your car's fuel efficiency. It's a little gimmicky, but for the environmentally conscious among us, the tool can be handy.

The phone's design reminds us of the Samsung Reclaim, another eco-friendly phone on Sprint. Measuring 3.5 inches long by 2.5 inches wide by 0.6 inch thick, the Remarq has a rounded square shape when closed, and it slides upward to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard underneath. The four-row keyboard feels very spacious and the keys are nicely domed with a good click feel when pressed. As for the display, it's quite colorful and supports 262,000 colors plus it has 320x240-pixel QVGA resolution. Even though the Remarq is recyclable, it doesn't feel  cheap or chintzy, plus the rounded shape means it comfortable feel.

Aside from its eco-friendliness, the Remarq is a pretty basic phone. Its features include the typical text and multimedia messaging, support for personal and work e-mail, instant messaging, a music player, a microSD card slot, stereo Bluetooth, a speakerphone, and a 1.3-megapixel camera with 2x digital zoom. You also get quick access to social networking Web sites like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. If you want, you could easily upload pictures to these social networks directly from the phone. It has a rated talk time of 5.5 hours.