Nokia Launches Energy-Saving Phones

The company's new handsets send alerts to users notifying them when their phone has been successfully charged.

Nokia on May 10 announced new phones designed to help users save energy by notifying them when their phone has been charged.

The phones feature an alert that encourages people to unplug the charger once the battery is full, helping to reduce the amount of electricity used. Nokia officials said the company hopes to include the feature across its product line.

The first phones that will offer the energy-saving alert system are the Nokia 1200, Nokia 1208 and Nokia 1650.

"Around two-thirds of the energy used by a mobile phone is lost when it is unplugged after charging but the charger itself is left in a live socket," Kirsi Sormunen, vice president of Environmental Affairs at Espoo, Finland-based Nokia, said in a statement. "We want to reduce this waste and are working on reducing to an absolute minimum the amount of energy our chargers use.

By 2010, Nokia hopes to have reduced the energy consumption of its chargers by an additional 50 percent - the amount of electricity a charger consumes while it is still plugged into an outlet but not the phone.

"The new alerts also play an important role, encouraging people to help us in this goal by unplugging their chargers," Sormunen said.