5/17/2005

Here comes the new Sony Ericsson Premini-IIS. The Premini series is nice because they are smaller than your average Japanese keitai, yet unlike the Tu-Ka phones, they didn’t have to remove all the cool features such as camera and email capabilities to reach a reasonable size. Also, the Premini phones look nice and this one is no surprise there either. Specs include a 1.9″ QVGA screen, 107×47x20mm and 99 grams, 1.3 megapixel camera.

But this time, this is not all beauty and small-ishness, the Premini-IIS is actually your excuse for usually being not-so-environmentally-friendly. As Tech-On! reports, NTT DoCoMo has now decided to use vegetable resin in commercial mobile phone handsets, starting with the premini-IIS which uses plastic with corn-based polylactide “as its major component in only one button”. If you haven’t read the last part properly, read it again: “as its major component in only one button”. Yes, overall this is great news. Yet, it is so funny.

The vegetable resin part is the button showed on that picture, inside the red circle. It is the button that changes the shooting mode of the camera from normal to close-up. This button was chosen “because it is not used very frequently,” according to NTT DoCoMo’s spokesperson. Last month, the two companies made a prototype handset based on the mova SO506iC model, using corn-based polylactide plastic. The prototype was not commercialized but of a total of 140 grams, 22 grams were made of vegetable resin. Hopefully, by testing the resin in real life now, NTT DoCoMo and Sony Ericsson will be able to release phones containing more of this resin soon.

via Tech-On!