BlackBerry Bold Tops Radiation Ranking 189
geek4 writes with this excerpt from eWeek Europe: "Data from the Environmental Working Group places the BlackBerry Bold 9700 as the mobile device with the highest legal levels of cell phone radiation among popular smartphones. Research In Motion's BlackBerry Bold 9700 scores the highest among popular smartphones for exposing users to the highest legal levels of cell phone radiation, according to the latest 2010 Environmental Working Group ranking. Following the Bold 9700 are the Motorola Droid, the LG Chocolate and Google's HTC Nexus One. The rankings still put the phones well within federal guidelines and rules."
This link would have been nice in the article... (Score:5, Informative)
Sweet (Score:2, Informative)
Research In Motion's BlackBerry Bold 9700 scores the highest among popular smartphones for exposing users to the highest legal levels of cell phone radiation
That is awesome. Now you know what cell will have the strongest possible signal!
Of course the unspoken assumption being made is that this cell phone radiation, aka radio waves, are somehow a bad thing or undesirable.
Re:lol, where's the iPhone? (Score:2, Informative)
I believe all the iPhone troubles, to be the fault of AT&T, since nowhere else in the world do iPhones seem to have as much as trouble!
Re:no comprende (Score:3, Informative)
Then why is it a story?
Because we know from the meatpacking, pharmaceutical, and genetically modified crop industries just how much those lobbyist-paid federal regulators have (hah) public safety at heart. So we want to see the numbers and decide for ourselves.
Re:no comprende (Score:5, Informative)
Three reasons come to mind:
1. Even though it's within limits, there are people who intentionally look for units that emit the least RF possible, so that if it does turn out there was a risk they are minimizing their risk. It's at least more rational than sleeping in a Faraday cage and suing neighbors for WiFi radiation or wearing tinfoil underwear. If you need a cell phone but have some concerns about RF exposure, picking the cell phone that emits the lowest levels of RF just seems like a rational middle ground.
2. Some will intentionally seek out phones with high RF because more RF means the radio has more juice or the antenna is more efficient, which means it'll get "more bars in more places". I know my Blackberry Curve 8310 gets awesome signal in a lot of places that iPhones don't, so I'm sure that also means it's putting out more RF and/or has a more efficient antenna.
3. If it's GSM, one of the side effects is the annoying clicky-buzzing sound every nonshielded electronic device within ten yards emits. Less RF means less of that interference.
Re:lol, where's the iPhone? (Score:3, Informative)
That's the problem with anecdotal evidence.
I've never had signal strength problems with my iPhone here in Australia, nor has anyone I know complained about it.
Re:This link would have been nice in the article.. (Score:2, Informative)
This link [ewg.org] would have been even better. You see they have 1.58 W/kg. You have over a dozen phones above 1.5. Somebody always has to be the highest. Actually, the model number they cite is not the worst, although the worst is still a Blackberry.
True, they are several times worst than the best; but is that meaningful? If the standard for poison X in the water is 100 ppm, and your city water has 2 ppm and mine has 20 ppm that's a factor of 10 but it doesn't mean anything if you believe that the standard is safe.
Oh, and I was wondering about the units--W/kg. It appears that they use some kind of test that measures how much a body would absorb per unit mass, which is actually pretty cool.
Radiation yes, but non-ionizing radiation folks... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:lol, where's the iPhone? (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the URL with the full list of phones (yes, including the iPhone if you're curious): http://www.ewg.org/cellphoneradiation/Get-a-Safer-Phone?allavailable=1 [ewg.org]
Re:Just to head this off... (Score:3, Informative)
The 1100 watts of microwaves from your microwave are of the riht band(s) to act on the water molecules in your body. Your cell phone and other wireless devices do not use these bands. The vast majority of the EM that is emitted by these devices goes right through you without doing anything. Now I should also add that the perforated sheet of metal that lets you see through the glass also reflects the EM from the microwave and thus very little EM actually escapes because it is a faraday cage. You can stand in front of one all day long compltely uninjured. X-ray machines O.T.O.H. are shielded (for the operators) by a significant quantity of Lead. Further, microwave EM is not radiologically equivalent to X-rays as microwave EM is not ionizing. X-rays are. Big difference.
Re:Just to head this off... (Score:2, Informative)
> Electromagnetic radiation in any amount has effects on human biology.
There's no evidence to suggest that all electromagnetic radiation has biological effects. Radiation of appropriate energy could theoretically be scattered, or absorbed and re-emitted, or just pass straight through a person, and leave them in a state no different to if they hadn't been exposed at all. Some radiation has effects, but there's also some that almost certainly doesn't.
> Many not well understood.
You can't meaningfully count "effects" and separate them into "well understood" vs "not well understood" and compare the sizes of those sets. At least, not without a lot of context describing how you categorize types of effects and quantify our understanding of them. Without that, this sentence is meaningless flamebait.
> As every coin has two sides it seems likely that these effects cause both positive and negative effects.
Again you make a claim with no evidence. I hope you don't actually make choices based on irrelevant coin analogies.
Loon badge granted.
Re:So? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Oh good (Score:3, Informative)
The SAR they talk about can only depend on:
1) strength of signal
2) wavelength of signal
3) position of signal
There really are no other variables for an omnidirectional antenna, which a cellphone needs in order to work properly. The wavelength is going to be set by the spectrum of the carrier, the signal strength is limited by the FCC.... so what are you measuring? Basically all that is left is where you hold the antenna, right? Jump over to the actual article [ewg.org] at the Environmental Working Group and see if you find them credible or a bit more on the wacko side. A cursory read of the site made them seem somewhere in the middle to me - like environmental wingnuts who are sort of trying to understand all this complicated science stuff, but don't really have a deep understanding of any of it.
Re:Actually. . . (Score:3, Informative)
That is not a study. A book on how cancer might be caused by cellphone radiation proves nothing. You need a real, large-scale experiment to determine whether it is actually happening.
You are falsely assuming the content of a book you have not read.
Do you honestly wish me to lay out a few hundred pages of white paper study in order to back up my statements? Despite the fact that what the poster actually wants is not proof, but rather to invalidate my argument by demanding an impossible amount of paper work for a casual poster to supply, (the same tactic corporate lawyers use to defeat private individuals; they create legal demands which are so cripplingly expensive to meet that they win by default.)
I have countered this tactic by in fact offering exactly the work demanded, BUT in doing so the poster is required to meet me half-way by expending some of his own energy and time.
That book contains significant excerpts from a multitude of exactly the kind of studies demanded. It is authored by a well respected researcher who spent half is professional life collecting such studies from hundreds of scientists as well as performing his own. It is an excellent and easy to use portal to a wide world of verifiable research.
In fact, anybody who really wants to know the true state of affairs wrt this subject, is being handed a gift with such a book. But most of the people responding here are not seekers. They are hiding. They don't want to know. They are playing denial games, (as is evidenced by the amount of raw emotion in their posts), and as such no amount of proof would ever be satisfactory, because they have determined that they will remain in their bubble-realities no matter what.
-FL