Nokia to Add Energy-Saving Alerts

Nokia wants mobile phone customers to save energy by unplugging their phone chargers when they're not in use.

Nokia, the world’s largest mobile handset maker, thinks it’s come up with a way for its customers to save enough electricity to power some 85,000 homes a year: just unplug those phone chargers when they’re not in use.

“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,” said Kirsi Sormunen, Nokia’s VP of Environmental Affairs at Nokia, in a statement. “We want to reduce this waste and are working on reducing to an absolute minimum the amount of energy our chargers use.”

To that end, Nokia plans to introduce alerts encouraging users to unplug their phone charters once their phones’ batteries are fully charged. The new alerts will debut with Nokia’s 1200, 1208, and 1650 handsets—mass market phones announced last week which are expected to have high sales volumes globally—and will be rolled out across the Nokia product line over time.

The alerts are one component of a series of environmentally-friendly initiatives mobile manufacturers have agreed to adopt to encourage energy savings. Nokia is the first phone maker to roll out the alerts. Nokia is also working to increase the efficiency of its phone chargers, and hopes to reduce the power drawn by their chargers when they’re plugged into the wall (but without a phone) by another 50 percent by 2010.