Samsung Crest Solar E1107 (Samsung Solar Guru)

Solar Powered phones have been all the rage this year - but few of the announced handsets seem to be available anywhere. Samsung hope to change this with the Samsung Crest Solar E1107 (called the Samsung Solar Guru in India), a very basic phone with a solar panel on the back which may just be the first solar powered option that many consumers will have.

Cast your mind back a few months and you might remember that Samsung announced the Blue Earth handset, a relatively high-end touchscreen phone. But the Crest Solar is just a solar powered version of the existing E1100, a phone that doesn't exactly set the pulse racing.

It's perhaps worth considering just what the point of a solar powered phone is. In truth, it doesn't save much money - a typical Nokia charger consumes less than 5W of power, so a 6 hour charge uses up 30 watt hours, which works out at around one euro cent for a full charge. To take another example: Drax is a well-known power station in the UK, and it provides enough energy to charge 800 million mobile phones at any one time. Clearly, mobile phones do draw quite a lot of energy worldwide, but in context this is clearly not a major issue.

Instead, the main benefit will be to people who don't have easy access to electricity. This covers a surprisingly broad range of consumers - for example, customers in developing countries who have limited access to mains power, through to customers in richer nations who enjoy outdoor activities that take them a long way from urban areas. Fundamentally, it helps to address the issue that "go anywhere" mobile phones are also often tied to an electrical socket.

It makes sense to keep a solar powered phone as simple as possible, because the simpler the phone is then the lower the power drain.. and the more use you can get out of the solar panels. To this end, the Samsung E1107 is a really very simple phone with a 128 x 128 pixel display, an FM radio and a built-in flashlight plus GPRS data and a WAP browser. There's really nothing else going on here apart from that - the E1107 just covers the absolute essentials.

Samsung says that a one hour charge from the solar panels can provide 5 to 10 minutes talktime. Not a lot, perhaps, but if you're stuck up a mountain with a broken leg then that is really all you need.

If you want one of these, then you shouldn't have long to wait. According to Samsung, the E1107 Crest Solar should be available from this month, and will eventually be sold across South Asia, Europe and Latin America.

Sources indicate that the E1107 will retail for about €50 SIM-free including taxes when it becomes available this summer.