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Motorola’s ‘green’ phone – cheap and old

Tony Chan | February 6, 2009 | 0 Comments

Motorola’s environmentally-friendly W233 Renew handset will be distributed by T-Mobile in the US for a bargain basement price of US$10 with a two-year contract.

The problem is: what was Motorola thinking with its first ‘green’ handset by bringing to market a model that severely compromises on performance. It’s akin to asking users to go back to dial-up from their always-on broadband connections because it uses less energy. It just doesn’t make any sense.

So what’s wrong with the W233? Well, pretty much everything. It features a tiny 1.6-inch display with only 65,000-colours. In comparison, the latest handsets on the market offer 3-inch displays with up to 1.6 million colours. It also only works on two-bands of 2G GSM network. Data connections are limited to GPRS and there’s no camera.

To put it simply, the W233 is decidedly several generations old.

One has to wonder why Motorola spent the R&D dollars, only to put together such an entry-level model.

Basic logic, and many surveys have shown, says that people are willing to pay more for being ‘green’. Even if the company was simply trying to avoid the message that green equals more expensive, it still shouldn’t offer consumers such as dud.

Asking ‘green’ consumers to compromise on performance in order to be environmentally friendly is just the kind of misconception that the industry should avoid. If companies like Motorola truly want to attract the green consumer, it should try release attractive, high performance phones into the segment, not a model with two-year-old technology and missing basic features like a camera.

More importantly, a look at what’s green about the W233 shows that almost any handset could have been developed the same way.

The most evident ‘green’ factor is the phone’s casing, which is made from recycled plastic water bottles, and which is in turn 100 recyclable. Motorola will further offset the energy required to manufacture the handset through a partnership with Carbonfund.org. There’s no reason why these factors can’t be applied to more advanced models.

Other ‘green’ elements of the product include 22% smaller packaging, the use of vegetable-based inks and 100% post consumer recycled paper, and the elimination, or limited use, of a list of controlled substances – all of which should be adopted as standard practice anyways.