2 weeks Ago By Brad Bennett
Buying a smartphone has gotten a little easier in the European Union thanks to a handy new smartphone labelling system that makes it easy to understand how good each phone or tablet is. While it does have a bit of a learning curve to decode it, it shares some excellent information regarding each device. This is like the labels on household utilities that tell you how much energy they use, but more tailored to what you’d want from a phone.
It starts with a colour-coded efficiency rating, which looks friendly and easy to understand, but I’m not sure what this represents regarding phones. It’s unclear if it’s some measure of the phone’s total environmental impact or how efficient the device is in general. Thankfully, the rest is a little easier to understand with the first listing showing expected battery life per cycle and lifespan over years.
It also shows the phone’s IP waterproof/dustproof rating. Finally, it measures drop protection and repairability on a scale of A-E. Overall, this seems like a good thing, but I worry that people won’t know what an IP rating is, so that would have been nice to spell out for regular shoppers.
Just simply say “waterproof (depth of 10m)” or whatever the IP rating actually equates to. I also wonder where the stats for these sheets will come from. Will companies supply them, or will they be created through EU third-party tests? On top of that, how standardized will the battery life tests be? There are a lot of questions that won’t be answered until these are put into practice in June of this year, but either way, they seem like a solid practice, and it would be awesome to see a version of this come to Canada.
Source: European Commission.
