Nokia’s Latest Bright Idea

Kudos to Nokia for adding the smarts to their cell phones to let a user know to unplug the char­ger from the wall socket. Appar­ently this simple oper­a­tion (pre­sum­ing people actu­ally do unplug the phones — as opposed to leav­ing them plugged in and char­ging all night) will allow sav­ing “enough elec­tri­city to power 85,000 homes a year”. From their press release I gather that 1/3 of the energy con­sumed by cell phones and char­gers is by leav­ing the char­ger plugged into a live socket after the phone has been unplugged. A simple code addi­tion to add the warn­ing to the phone prom­ises sig­ni­fic­ant energy sav­ings. The big ques­tion is, what about all those other non-operational appli­ances run­ning in the home and still plugged into a live socket? Maybe there is prom­ise in hav­ing smarter appli­ances start to help their own­ers to learn how to con­serve energy. You know? I might even be able to start unplug­ging my char­ger without hav­ing my phone telling me to do so.