Various mobile phone manufacturers take diverse factors into consideration when designing and executing the construction of a new mobile phone. These factors inevitably dovetail into a new mobile phone that gives its users the best of all possible worlds. At the top of the list is usually price – how much the unit will cost to build, how much the extra hardware for the feature sets will cost to construct and integrate and so on. Along with this typically comes functionality – what features the phone will include, what it won’t, what will have to take priority, and how everything fits budget-wise. Interestingly, various mobile phone models are now being constructed with an additional factor taking priority: environment-friendly construction.
The green gadget revolution – which is gaining ground in the post-modern, environmentally conscious world – has reached the realm of mobile phones, and various mobile phone manufacturers are looking into various ways to make their mobile units greener. These ways are diverse but almost uniformly simple, and range from modifying units to consume less power, to constructing mobile phone frames out of recycled materials. With the Reclaim, Sprint and Samsung have put together a mobile phone made from recycled plastic, packaged in a recycled-paper box with soy-based ink used for the user manual, the Reclaim is one of the most visibly green phones right down to its shiny green shell. It has a generally blocky silhouette similar to the Samsung Propel and a somewhat unusual but sturdy slider design that takes a bit of getting used to but is functional nevertheless, with a great variety of features and a full QWERTY keyboard. It even fits well in hands and pockets, and the build quality is excellent and proves that recycled materials can build a sturdy phone.
The Reclaim has a 2.6-inch, 262,000-color display with 320×240 resolution, which is bright and colorful despite not being significantly sizeable. Sprint’s One Click interface is supported by the Reclaim as well, making the interface intuitive and easy to pick up. This is made better by a simple but effective navigation array and comfortable full QWERTY, which allows for quick and correct typing despite the individual keys being flush together. Aside from Function and number keys [which are marked in green] and shift, symbol, back, and enter buttons, shortcut keys are also included for the email and texting applications and there’s also a separate emoticon controller.
The Reclaim’s diverse features include a 600-contact phone book, Bluetooth with stereo profile, voice command and dialing support, IM capability, USB transfer and a variety of applications like the ScanLife barcode scanner, Facebook, YouTube and numerous Google services, as well as POP3 email syncing for Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail. Basic multitasking support allows you to push other apps to the background while you focus on one task. The music player is only okay, with shuffle and repeat modes being the main features to speak of, and the lack of MP3 ringtone support is painfully noticeable. Also mediocre is the 2-megapixel camera, which has no flash but takes pictures in five resolutions. Call quality is serviceable, and the volume level is fairly loud.
Samsung’s Reclaim SPH-M560 is one phone that does the latter without seeming like a green gimmick, managing to provide its owner with user-friendly controls and effective multimedia features despite average call quality and somewhat inconsistent 3G speeds.
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