WirelessWave, a national Canadian wireless retailer has been running some catchy ads recently.  One features a young couple walking along a pristine coastline.   The man skips a stone across the water and the woman proceeds to toss her cell phone along after it.

The problem?

This ad sends the wrong message about the appropriate way to dispose of an old cell phone.  With toxic chemicals like mercury, arsenic, cadmium, brominated flame retardants, etc, the last place an old cell phone belongs is in a lake, creek, river, or ocean.  One tiny drop of mercury is enough to poison an entire lake.

Kids who see this ad may get the idea that dumping cell phones and other toxic products in the water is perfectly acceptable, after all, people on TV did it.

While not as sexy or romantic, it sure would be nice to see WirelessWave, Telephone Booth, and Wireless Etc (all part of Glentel) advertise that they offer to do the responsible thing with old cell phones and work with a company like CellCycle.ca to ensure that they get recycled. 

We’d even help them out for free.

Until now, if you’re like me you’ve had to shop around for the best deal you can find when getting a cell phone plan and then live with it for three years while your contract runs its course. At the end of the contract though, you’re always left with a decision about sticking it out with your current provider or buying a new phone with new contract with a new carrier (if your phone lasts that long).

With Bell & Telus set to roll out upgrades to their networks this fall, could this perhaps be the beginning of more competition in Canada?

The beauty of the new technology is that GSM phones for years have featured the ability to be “unlocked” meaning that a phone from one GSM provider can be used on another carrier.

Bell & Telus are apparently performing the upgrade to enable them to offer Apple’s iPhone to their customers which is great. It will also enable a greater selection of handsets such as the Motorola RAZR line and hopefully drive the cost of wireless service down for everyone.

With a price tag of $1 billion for the upgrades, however, you can bet that subscribers will be footing the bill for this improvement.

With the first 50 trees planted and taking root in the public park on Sun King Crescent in Barrie’s South End, our next target is to collect a minimum of 1000 phones between June and August, 2009, so that we can plant an additional 1000 trees on the first day of fall.

We’re off to a good start so far, having collected 50 phones in May alone.

Please lend a hand by taking the time to recycle your old cell phone at one of our drop boxes and by encouraging the people you know to take part as well. 

Together we can make a difference!

After collecting 50 cell phones in May, we executed our first 50 seedling planting today at the public park on Sun King Crescent in Barrie’s south end.  Despite teeming rain, the soil was soft and permitted us to get the trees in the ground without issue.

 We’re hoping to have several hundred seedlings to plant this fall when the ground cools down and the trees stand a good chance of survival.

Special thanks to Don Wright and A News for coming out  and covering our event despite the rain.

Please continue to recycle your cell phone through us and help us improve the environment!

Planning this weekend’s FIRST tree planting!

If your cell phone is more than a few years old, you might not be able to use the latest hands-free headsets that are available on the market.  There are many to choose from, models that fit inside your ear like earbuds and full headphone styles as well.  Some bluetooth enabled car stereos will even allow you to talk through your car stereo.

All is not lost, however, because if your phone supports a wired headphone you can still use your cell phone while driving without handling it.  There are even some adapters on the market that can allow you to use a bluetooth headset with a phone that has a standard headphone jack.

For ease of use, however, bluetooth headsets go a little further.  Not only do they allow you to talk without holding the phone,  many can also be configured to work with speech recognition to enable you to dial the phone hands-free and also end the call without having to reach for the phone.  Wired headsets and even those adapters won’t allow you to do that.

If you’re concerned about getting a ticket under the upcoming hands-free laws in Ontario, your best bet is to make sure you have a cell phone that has Bluetooth support, and that you make use of a Bluetooth headset.

Not so long ago I worked at a local Staples store in the computers & business machines department as a part timer to help finance my education.  It was a pretty good job, aside from having ethical questions about selling those “extended warranties,”  and I learned a lot about the technology solutions on the market for small businesses.  As part of my job I had to tidy shelves at the end of every shift and always took time to read the packages of the various devices I would straighten up.

To this day one thing that stands out to me was a “Dragon Naturally Speaking Voice Recorder.”  It was a digital voice recorder that interfaced with your PC to recognize speech files and turn them in to text.  Seemed like a pretty neat idea but it never really sold that well in the store.

Fast forward a few years and here I am trying to recycle cell phones.  Not much in common, or is there?

I’ve been paying attention to the new hands-free laws that are coming into effect here in Ontario and in other jurisdictions in Canada and the United States.  It seems to me that we’ve got a real problem on our hands and the technology already exists to enable people to text while driving without taking their hands off the wheel.

With the ever increasing power of mobile devices like the Blackberry, iPhone, and the various smartphones that run Windows, it would seem to me that a version of Nuance Software’s Dragon Naturally Speaking should make an easy transition onto the next mobile device you put your hands on (while not driving, of course).  The company already advertises that the software will recognize speech through certain Bluetooth enabled headsets so it should just a matter of tweaks to make it lean enough to run on a mobile.

On the other side of the equation, Kurzweil and other companies have had text to speech software solutions for over 2 decades.  It should be no problem to have your mobile read an incoming text message or email to you.

I’m hoping as I write this that manufacturers like RIM, Apple, Nokia & Motorola will take notice and add this sort of functionality to the next wave of wireless devices.  Other people on the road will thank you for it!

Thanks to everyone who’s taken the time to recycle their old phones through the CellCycle.ca bins located at select Zehrs, both Canadian Tire stores and Georgian College, we’ve collected our 50th phone!

Now it’s time for us to hold up our end of the bargain – on Saturday, June 20th, we will be planting 50 white spruce tree seedlings in the public park located on Sun King Crescent in Barrie’s south end (just off Mapleview).

Anyone who would like to come out is more than welcome!