[Mark Licea:] Hey, I'm Mark Licea and this week, we get the skinny on the PS3 Slim; Newsweek names the greenest companies in America; and Honda's U3X gets us up to speed at 4 miles per hour. The Green Show starts now.
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[Mark Licea:] PS3 Slim is almost half the size of the original. It's also less expensive, but what about the power consumption? We spoke to one of our CNET editors to find out.
Hey, I'm here with one of our senior associate editors, Matt Moskovciak and in front of us here, we have the PS3 and the PS3 Slim. Matt, you wrote an article in Crave recently on how the PS3 Slim is much more energy efficient, so how much more efficient are we talking?
[Matt Moskovciak:] It uses about half the power of the original 60-gigabyte PS3 that we have looked at and we tested a variety of things, whether it's playing a Blu-ray movie or if you just have it on idling or playing a game and in each case, it used less than half the power. We tested the original Xbox for power consumption and that came in at about like 180 watts, so it's going to be significantly less than the Xbox 360.
[Mark Licea:] So, just give us a quick example of some of the different tests that you guys run to measure the efficiency.
[Matt Moskovciak:] Sure. The first one we did is just idling, so you just turn it on and you're on like the main menu screen and surprisingly that uses, you know, most of the energy just having it on. You're up to 75 watts already. Then, you know, we threw in a Blu-ray movie. We used Pirates of the Caribbean. It has a lot of Java menus and stuff like that. That bumps you up to about 80. So, you're only actually using five more watts to watch a Blu-ray movie than you do just by idling. Now, if you play a game, that's where you get the most energy consumption and that bumps you all the way up to about 96 watts.
[Mark Licea:] So, we're saving all this wattage with the PS3 Slim. How does that convert to dollars?
[Matt Moskovciak:] Not that much. When you look at it, it looks like a lot of watts, but even if you were to play like 20 hours a week for a whole year, the difference between the two would come down to less than $15.
[Mark Licea:] Great. Well, thanks for all the information.
[Matt Moskovciak:] Thanks for having me.
[Mark Licea:] Newsweek Magazine took a look at 500 American companies and ranked them on their environmental policies. Now, even though the PS3 Slim is more efficient, Sony is still a Japanese company. That's not eligible for consideration. But, some other major tech names topped the list. IBM ranked 5th. It has had environmental policies since 1971. Intel came in 4th as the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy and Dell whose company headquarters is run entirely on renewable energy took the number 2 spot. The highest ranked company on the list was Hewlett-Packard. They are the first big IT company to report green house gas emissions. Some other notables were Microsoft at number 31, Google at 79, and Apple which ranked 133rd.
Speaking of Apple, they may not be happy with Newsweek's score. The company just updated its website so consumers can -- quote, "get the full story on Apple's environmental footprint." If you go to apple.com/environment, you can see the impact the product has on the planet based on life cycle and consumer use. According to information on the site, manufacturing Apple products accounts for 38% of emissions, while consumer use is responsible for 53%. Apple says the majority of greenhouse gas emissions they account for are produced when Apple products are used by consumers. So, it's all our fault and we can't blame Apple for being so popular.
Moving right along, Honda showed off their U3-X prototype and it moves like an electric unicycle.
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[Mark Licea:] Honda's unicycle Segway-like device has a lithium battery that lasts one hour and it reaches a top speed of 4 miles an hour. The seat wings don't exactly look sturdy and Honda says they have no plans to release it to the public. They say the U3-X is more about showing off an engineering breakthrough, but that it could be useful for the elderly in places like airports or hotels. I don't know too many elderly that would be comfortable on an electric unicycle and those that would, they don't need it.
That's it for this week. Send your feedback to greenshow@cnet.com. I'm Mark Licea. Thanks for watching.
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