Nokia 301 Joins O2 “Chargers Out Of The Box” Range

The Nokia 301 is the first mass-market phone to be shipped without a mains charger as part of O2’s “chargers out of the box” campaign, as the operator sees whether the initiative can work in this section of the market.

The handset will come with just a USB cable, encouraging customers to use existing mains chargers acquired through the purchase of existing mobile phones. Those who require a charger can get one from O2 at a discounted price.

It is the fifth phone to be included in the programme, but the other four have all been high end smartphones. O2 says that 82 percent of customers who have bought a charger-less phone have decided the USB cable is all they need.

Nokia 301 charger-less

“We have trialled a series of flagship smartphones on Chargers out of the Box. Now we want to pilot a less expensive handset – to establish whether customers who tend to purchase these phones are more or less likely to need chargers than those of top-end phones,” said Bill Eyres, head of the Think Big programme at O2.

“We need to establish whether this is the case in order to build the case to apply the scheme more widely across our range – working with our manufacturing partners.”

The “chargers out of the box” campaign was launched by O2 in 2012 to cut down the amount of environmental waste caused by unnecessary chargers, of which it estimates there are 100 million in the UK.

It says that the unused chargers amount to 18,700 tonnes of components, 124,274 miles of copper wire and plastic covering and the volume of landfill required if they were thrown away would be enough to fill four Olympic swimming pools.

O2 wants to supply all of its mobile phones without chargers by 2015 and has already signed up the HTC One X+, HTC One, Nokia Lumia 925 and Sony Xperia SP to the programme.

“This is another huge step forward for our scheme. We led the way just twelve months ago,” added Eyres. “We hope that others will join the campaign and deliver what the vast majority of consumers want based on all our experience – a saving to the environment that costs them nothing.”

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