If you are looking for a way to save trees by reading books on an e-reader but you don’t like the Sony Reader or can’t use the Amazon Kindle you might want to check out the Cool-er e-reader.

The Cool-er (Yes, that the actual name of the e-reader. And no, it’s not cool.) e-reader looks like one of those colorful ipods, although it’s a bit bigger. The Cool-er e-reader will offer a larger library of books than the Amazon Kindle and will sell the digital books in the open EPub format.

In USA the Cool-er user will be able to choose from around 260,000 paid-for titles at launch from all the major publishers. In Europe we will initially only have around 60,000 titles to choose from.

The e-reader will be available in the USA and Europe early June this year and cost $249.

Al Gore and The Alliance for Climate Protection have announced that they are interested in creating a new .eco domain name extension. The .eco domain extension will be for individuals to express their support for environmental causes, for companies to promote their environmental initiatives, and for environmental organizations to maintain their websites in a namespace that is more relevant to their core missions.

“We fully support Dot Eco LLC in its efforts to secure the .eco top level domain through the ICANN application process and look forward to working with Dot Eco LLC to promote .eco. This is a truly exciting opportunity for the environmental movement and for the internet as a whole,” said Al Gore.

But what is more exciting than a new “green” domain extension is that a majority of the profits generated from the sales of the .eco domains will be distributed to support environmental causes and organizations.

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Swedish designer Peter Thuvander has come up with the iYo YoYo, a nifty green alternative way to charge your iPhone or iPod.

“To celebrate my new Iphone and the fact that darkness is looming over me. I´ve done this: An induction powered yoyocharger for Apple.

And since solarchargers don’t work at night or in Sweden half the year, this should be a smash hit.”

Thanks to a small Li-ion battery inside the yo-yo you build up a charge while you play with the iYo YoYo. Afterwards you can just plug in your iPod or iPhone and it will be charged.

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Sony Ericsson recently released a new eco-friendly concept phone called the GreenHeart. According to Sony Ericsson the phone is made from bio-plastic housings, recycled plastic keypads and will come with an “environmentally conscious packaging” (see the picture to the right). The phone will have a zero charger with 3.5mW standby power. The manuals to the phone will no longer be printed on paper and will instead be offered as HTML based e-manuals that you can read on your computer. With the phone Sony Ericsson also wants to ship a game style educational application called “Ecomate”.

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Apple recently released their new line of MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops, which are mainly made from aluminium. They say that they are their greenest latops ever and claims that they are “highly recyclable and even more energy efficient”, and that they are “designed with the environment in mind”.

But really, how green are the new laptops?

Greenpeace, who is running a hard and successful campaign for greener electronics, says that the new laptops are “not quite the breakthrough” they “were hoping for”:

“A check of the full specs revealed the MacBook Pro, MacBook and MacBook Air – as well as the LED Cinema Display will now have internal cables free of PVC and will have internal components containing no BFRs. Not quite the breakthrough we were hoping for. These new MacBooks are currently on a similar level of toxics reduction to the Sony Viao laptop series on PVC, and the Lenovo Think Vision in monitors. The BFR free internal components represent an improvement from the bar set by the Vaio line.”

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Tangent, who mainly provides computer solutions to education, government, corporate, and healthcare markets, have announced Evergreen 17, a “green” and “ultra power efficient” touch screen PC.

According to Tangent the Evergreen 17 only consumes 24 watts, which is 72% less than the Energy Star 4.0 rating requires.

“Not only do users experience computing with a touch screen LCD in a space-saving form factor, they also get industry leading power efficiency at 24 watts and 72% less energy usage than Energy Star 4.0 limits,” said Douglas Monsour, Tangent’s President. “This translates into cost-savings while, at the same time, helping the environment.”

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Today PC World unveiled, via its Advent brand, a new eco-friendly computer called Advent Eco PC.

The Advent Eco PC is made from 75% recycled plastics, comes with electronic manuals, uses 25 watts when idling and is said to save you £35 (about $65) a year on energy. The computers specs are surely enough for the average computer user: 1.5GHz Core 2 Duo T5250 CPU, 2GB RAM, 160GB hard drive, 802.11b/g, and Vista Home Premium.

But, the Advent Eco PC is almost one year late, it should have been released last Christmas. And this is a disadvantage for the computer. The design and specs are not as “mind-blowing” as they are on Dell’s new eco-friendly computer. To be fair, the computer looks like an ugly wifi router, and it’s a bit more expensive than similar green computers.

But if you want to have an eco-friendly computer that will save you money on your energy bill the Advent Eco PC is a good option for you to consider. The Advent Eco PC starts at £599.99 (about $1100).

Nowadays the concerns about the environment are very present in the minds of more and more people. Maybe because of the huge amount of information that circles on the internet in site and blogs like this one, because they saw it on the TV, or because they have already suffered from some of the effects of climate change: floods, extreme drought, heavy snow storms, etc.

Some of the solutions presented to prevent or decrease the effects of global warming are, as we all know: Drive you car less times, use public transports, shutdown all electric devises when they are not in use, recycle etc.

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Edison is a new and free energy-saving PC software from the developers at Verdiem. The software makes it a lot easier for you to control your computers power saving features helping you save electricity and money.

Edison doesn’t shut down your computer completely; it just puts it in a “suspend mode” which uses much less energy than if the computer would be running normally. You can decide if you want to schedule Edison to shut down the computer screen and hard drive before going into the suspend mode. The software also displays how much electricity, CO2 emissions, and money you have saved.

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The ATP 8GB EarthDrive claims to be the world’s first eco-friendly USB drive. The EarthDrive is made from bio-recycled plastics and is designed to be fully recyclable at the end of its life. A portion of all sales will be donated to American Forests and towards the planting of trees.

“The EarthDrive takes our more than fifteen years of effort, design and quality implementation in the memory marketplace to the next level. Now, more than anytime in the history of our company, we are committed to creating products that take into consideration the environmental impact on our world and our global community.” says Michael Plaksin, ATP Vice President of Sales.

The USB drive is shock and water proof, has a built in security software, drive partitioning and password protection. It has a capacity of 8GB and costs $47.99.