Intivation

The low-cost solar-powered mobile phone (for people without electricity)

By Mike Hanlon

16:57 February 18, 2009 PST

It's sometimes difficult in a white-bread-world to empathise with the have-nots, and we found some of the other media coverage of this story quite amusing. The Caribbean-based Digicel Group used the Barcelona Mobile World Congress to launch the world’s first low-cost solar-powered mobile phone yesterday and it's not designed for the environmentally conscious, but for the two billion people in the world who have limited or no access to electricity. The reason it doesn't have the high-end functionality we regard as essential is that its target audience is both functionally and technologically illiterate and the Coral-200-Solar will almost certainly be the first and possibly only phone they will ever own. Read More