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April 4th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda Sprint’s first 4G LTE phone is also its second “eco-friendly” Android smartphone to date. But where last year’s Samsung Replenish was a budget smartphone with a tiny screen and slow processor, the new LG Viper is a modern midrange smartphone, with up-to-date specs and NFC capabilities (complete with Google Wallet).
Sprint will start taking preorders for the LG Viper on April 12. It will launch “later in the month” for $99 after a $50 rebate, according to Sprint’s news release.
How powerful is the LG Viper?
The LG Viper isn’t as powerful as the iPhone 4S or today’s Android superphones, but its 4-inch display and 1.2 GHz dual-core process place it much closer than the Optimus S (Sprint and LG’s budget Android offering) or the Samsung Replenish, which is still available from Sprint. It doesn’t have the Replenish’s vertical chiclet keyboard, but it does have the more recent 2.3 “Gingerbread” version of Android. No word yet on whether or not it will be upgraded to Ice Cream Sandwich, and Android devices are typically slow to receive software updates, which add new features and extend their useful lives.
As far as other specs go, the LG Viper has a 5 megapixel camera and a VGA front-facing camera, and it has 4 GBs of built-in flash memory and a microSD card slot. This allows you to expand its memory by up to 32 GB, by buying a microSD card. The card can then be reused in other phones which support this feature (Apple’s do not).
How “eco-friendly” is the LG Viper?
As Annie Leonard explains at The Story of Electronics, truly “green” electronics are basically impossible. Not only do they require plastic and rare metals, the latter of which are often sourced from “conflict” areas under inhumane conditions, but just being “recyclable” and having recyclable packaging is not the same as being “recycled.” For most tech gadgets, having partway-recycled packaging and cases are about as close as they can come.
The LG Viper does that much, at least; its case is “made of 50 percent recycled plastics,” and its packaging “contains up to 87 percent of post-consumer paper, uses soy ink, [and is] made with a glueless construction”. Its RoHS compliance means it is free of many (but not all) environmental toxins; and it is ULE Platinum Certified, which means that it had to score 80 out of 109 points on a checklist for environmental safety and social responsibility.
The checklist was created by Sprint and its partners, but details on its criteria are given on Sprint’s website, and more are available from ULE. The specifics for which points it did and did not score are not available, however; for example, it may or may not have conflict metals in it, a criterion marked as optional in ULE’s guidelines.
Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about technology and electronics since 2008.
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