Digital Trends
A new report from market research firm IDC finds that cell phone shipments during 2006 reached a new peak: more than one billion units shipped during the calendar year. According to IDC, the year’s 1.019 billion cell phones represents a 22.5 percent increase over 2005 shipments, and most of the credit goes to emerging markets rather than phone-saturated areas like North America, Japan, and western Europe.
“Materials company Pvaxx Research & Development, at the request of U.S.-based mobile phone maker Motorola (MOT.N), has come up with a polymer that looks like any other plastic, but which degrades into soil when discarded.
Researchers at the University of Warwick in Britain then helped to develop a phone cover that contains a sunflower seed, which will feed on the nitrates that are formed when the polyvinylalcohol polymer cover turns to waste.”
More than 650 million cell phones will be sold this year with a good portion of those being thrown away in two years. One thing worth pointing out is that the article only talks about the cover being biodegradeable, but what about the rest of the phone?
It says it remains committed to flogging CDMA phones in Japan, one of its heartlands, and it will continue to develop CDMA machine-to-machine modules. But it is otherwise retrenching around GSM, UTMS and EDGE mobile platforms.
In another cost-cutting move, the struggling mobile phone maker is shutting down its Munich R&D centre, and cutting back at its US CDMA research facility, leading to the loss of 500 jobs.
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