The world of green consumerism is filled with funny names and odd brands.


This is fine when you’re buying a jar of peanut butter, but can be daunting when you’re looking to buy pricey electronics.  No one wants to invest in a green gadget when they’ve never heard of the company.Luckily, you don’t have to sacrifice your brand loyalty to become one with Mother Nature. We’ve compiled a list of laptops here that are environmentally friendly and have the established brand name behind them.


It’s like jumping on a green bandwagon with training wheels!

1. HP Compaq 2710p Not only has it won an epeat gold medal, but it’s a tablet as well. Making it environmentally friendly and really fun to use. The $2,246.00 price tag isn’t as friendly to your wallet. Never the less, if you’re in the market for a good PC that has a camera and long lasting battery life, this one is worth checking out. It even comes with an outdoor display panel to make it easier to see the screen in sunlight, just in case you’re really feeling the hippy vibe and are computing outside.


2. Dell D360 latitude laptop This too got a gold star from epeat for reducing environmentally sensitive materials. It’s designed for travel, so it has a protected hard drive in case you drop it and you can easily connect to WiFi. It has a high resolution screen and is lightweight. It’s professional look makes this a great computer for business work.  It would also be great for students who like caring their laptop to class for notes.


3. Apple Macbook Pro Series Surprise! Apple has some gold medal winners. They’ve been advertised as “the greenest lineup of notebooks,” which is interestingly phrased because the HP Compaq and Toshiba are actually “greener” by epeat standards.  Either way, the Macbook wins points for the sexiness factor. It’s highly recyclable, uses minimal packaging, comes with some great software and has a longer lasting battery. Plus, it’s a Mac and will help you jump about 10 points on the trendy scale just for sitting in Starbucks with it. Scarf and thick rimmed glasses not included.


4. Toshiba Portégé® R5000 Laptops It comes with all the fixings for an efficient computer; extended battery life, shock absorbing design to extend it’s life, extremely light and it scored an A+ from epeat for it’s end of life design (meaning it can be recycled easily) and lack of hazardous materials. I mostly like it because it has a fingerprint detector. No more passwords!


5. Sony VAIO BZ series notebook PC Like the Dell, this computer is built well for business. It boasts the compatibility and productivity features needed by IT professionals and business customers. It has a spill resistant keyboard, which is awesome for coffee guzzling workaholics, and damage resistant technology.  It too has a fingerprint detector and comes with a reduced amount of software, leaving all those useless programs out of the picture and freeing up memory.

So now that your Macbook is officially old, you might be looking for a few cool ways to get some extra use out of it. One of our favorite ideas: turn it into a digital pictureframe!

Instructables.com has a great step by step guide on how to do just that. Essentially, you’ll be separating the screen and the keyboard (while keeping the wires in tact) and using a sideshow or screen saver to display the photos. The step by step guide can be found here.

Any other cool ideas?

Yesterday afternoon at the WWDC keynote address, Apple unveiled the much anticipated successor to the iPhone 3G, aptly named the iPhone 3G S. S stands for the increased operating speed of the improved device. After months of speculation about the form that the new iPhone would take, Apple kept the upgrades relatively predictable, although still exciting. The phone will be available in the US on June 19th, and to the rest of the world on July 7th. Major improvements include:

• Improved battery life. This is sure to excite iPhone users, as it is one of the greatest complaints across the board. Apple indicates that web surfing time will increase to 9 hours from the current 6, a 50% increase in battery power.

• Hard drive size offerings increases to 16 GB and 32 GB from 8 GB and 16 GB

• A more powerful 600 MHZ CPU, and 256 MB system memory should speed up some of those slow apps.

• 3.0 MP camera is a nice upgrade, and the ability to record video is long overdue when coupled with multimedia messaging, the new iphone will be a big improvement over current models in terms of recording and sharing media.

• Find My Phone and Remote Data Wipe are two of my favorite features. You can track your phone remotely via MobileMe, and even erase data remotely. Which is very helpful if you misplace your phone.

In any case, I’m excited to get my hands of one of these new iPhones and try them out myself. The best part? Buying one won’t break the bank. The iPhone 3G is now selling at a reduced price point of $99, and the new iPhone 3G S will retail at $199 for the 16 GB and $299 for the 32 GB.