What’s Green, Made of Corn and Has Buttons?

Leave it to Sprint, the phone company based in Kansas, to introduce a cellphone made from corn. (Never mind that the phone is made by Samsung in South Korea, hardly a major corn producer.)

Sprint will sell Samsung’s Reclaim phone.Nonetheless, a corn-based “bioplastic” case was part of the array of ecological features of the new Reclaim phone Sprint said Thursday that it would start selling next week. The box is made of recycled material. To add to its green sheen, the company said $2 of every phone sale goes to the Nature Conservancy. The phone also beeps telling you to unplug the charger when its battery is full, a special button links to environmental news. The case, by the way, is either “ocean blue” or “earth green.”

For Sprint, however, this isn’t a niche product to sell to granola munchers in Berkeley and Boulder. It is an attempt to add some green sizzle to its lead entry this fall in the hottest segment of the cellphone market this year: cheap phones with full keyboards.

The $50 Reclaim isn’t quite a smartphone — it can’t run added applications — but it does look a bit like a green BlackBerry when its keyboard slides out. It’s meant for heavy e-mail and texting and also has built in applications to connect to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. It has a Web browser, but a text-based WAP version, not the graphical browsers now standard on high end phones. For $50, you also give up the touch-screen.

David Owens, Sprint’s director of customer acquisitions, said that this sort of phone with a keyboard is now outselling simpler devices. Indeed, the number of people choosing free phones is declining as customers search for more features or shift to pre-paid phone services. More new Sprint customers this year have picked a monthly plan that includes Web browsing (starting at Sprint at $69 per month) than a voice-only or voice-and-texting plans.

The Reclaim’s configuration is not going to last, however. Casey Ryan, the product manager for the Reclaim at Samsung, said that by next year, touch-screen phones, with full Web browsers running the Android operating system will be available for well under $100.

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