Sprint doesn’t work that great in my apartment, so I don’t plan to switch to Credo. I would rather give them my money than Verizon, but I need something that works.

Like Jenn, I feel paralyzed with some of these decisions so I just avoid them for as long as possible. Whenever it comes time to replace my personal phone, I plan to research green options, refurbs, and the radiation.

I manage our Sprint account at work, so I make sure to keep all broken/discarded devices out of the landfills.

Re: Radiation — I pretty much never have the phone against my head, but I hear ya. This is something that really needs to be regulated.

jenn — I too am all for reusing. In fact, once I was done testing the Reclaim, I gave it to a friend who had a near-dead Blackberry with Sprint service. She switched over her service to the new phone and has been using it! Oddly, even though Credo uses Sprint’s service, I was unable to simply transfer over my own service to the Reclaim — the phone had to be a “Credo phone,” said the rep. This is perhaps the biggest downside of credo. The company itself has got green values at its core, but it does not make using refurbished / used phones easy. Nor does it have a wide phone selection….

Jenn — “Paralyzed” is a good way of describing how I was dealing with the phone issues too. My phone had seriously been shutting off at random for a long long time — like yours, not battery-related — and as you can see, it was no longer pretty to look at, what with the paint chipping off. Yet it really took me a long time to actually decide to upgrade, even though the Blackberry was free (with renewed service contract) –

My idea of a green phone:
- re-use someone else’s phone
- new – minimal features (ie – phone, address book & sms, monochrome LED screen instead of color), high recycled content

My experiences with buying refurbished phones off Ebay have all been uniformly poor so I can’t say I recommend it (though the vendors are always good with returns and refunds).

Unfortunately, the level of radiation from my MotoQ9c is unknown: http://www.ewg.org/cellphoneradiation/Get-a-Safer-Phone?query=&provider_id=14&brand=Motorola

I’m getting brain cancer, I just know it.

The Reclaim is gives off a pretty high level of radiation compared to the top 10 phones.

http://www.ewg.org/cellphoneradiation/Get-a-Safer-Phone?query=reclaim&provider_id=&brand=

And the Blackberry is way, way up there:

http://www.ewg.org/cellphoneradiation/Get-a-Safer-Phone/provider/CREDO/