If you’ve been hold­ing off on pur­chas­ing an elec­tric scooter, this may be the beauty that you’ve been wait­ing for. The Mini Scooter E by BMW is a retro plug-in inspired by the Mini Cooper.  The scooter designs will fea­ture the same cir­cu­lar instru­ments and speedome­ter found on the famed vehi­cle, and a lithium ion-power source.

Not just an attrac­tive ride, the scooter has a hand­ful of impres­sive add-ons, includ­ing a smart phone dock­ing sta­tion that unlocks the vehicle, GPS soft­ware that scans for nearby Mini Scooter E’s, and a hel­met with an inte­grated micro­phone and head­phone set that allows rid­ers to lis­ten to music or use their phones while dri­ving. The scooter’s GPS sys­tem even trig­gers the vehi­cle to flash its head­lights when pass­ing another Mini Scooter E on the road.

BMW hasn’t revealed exactly how much the lithium ion-powered scooter will cost, but it’s esti­mated that they’ll be priced at over $6,000–significantly more expen­sive than stan­dard scooters.

(via Wired)

AT&T is offer­ing you guys the chance to be a small part of a big dif­fer­ence as it announces the launch of the ZERO Charger for phones.  They haven’t been launched quite yet — but they are on the precipice of being released.  You can put your email address in for an alert on their site.

When you leave your mobile phone charger plugged in when its not actu­ally juic­ing up a hand­set, you waste elec­tric­ity – some esti­mates see the over­all power suck from such sce­nar­ios as enough to power 24,000 homes for a year.  “‘Vam­pire draw’ is 100% elim­i­nated and you’ll never have to unplug your charger again,” states AT&T.  Plus, the charger is USB com­pat­i­ble mak­ing it one of the most ver­sa­tile “green” charg­ers on the market.

“In an effort to pro­vide envi­ron­men­tally friendly and sim­pler solu­tions for our cus­tomers, AT&T worked hand in hand with Supe­rior Com­mu­ni­ca­tions to cre­ate the first prac­ti­cal and user-friendly zero-draw charger for mobile phones,” said Carl­ton Hill, vice pres­i­dent of Devices and Prod­uct Devel­op­ment for AT&T’s wire­less oper­a­tions. “With the size of AT&T’s cus­tomer base, pro­vid­ing solu­tions like these helps our cus­tomers make a big difference.”

That’s where AT&T ZERO charger comes in — it works by auto­mat­i­cally sens­ing when a cell phone is not plugged in and cut­ting the power sup­ply from the wall socket. Now you can save elec­tric­ity (and your con­science) when you just grab your phone and go with­out tak­ing the time to cut the power.

The new eco-friendly charger has a five-star effi­ciency rat­ing, a “block and cable” design that will work with unspec­i­fied “future hand­sets” and pack­ag­ing made from 100% recy­cled paper.

While “Vam­pire energy” is cer­tainly an issue, and AT&T’s new charger is a boon for energy effi­ciency; the draw from your cell phone charger is so min­i­mal that it is very much NOT worth rush­ing out to replace your cur­rent charger. It would take years of using this charger before you would real­ize a return on your invest­ment in energy. Keep this new charger in mind if you lose or break your cur­rent charger, but for now, just unplug your charger when your phone is done charg­ing, and you’ll end up being far greener.

The charger, which is said to be priced the same as a stan­dard charger, is due to hit AT&T stores nation­wide this year.  There’s more info on the new green option for phone lovers over on AT&T’s site.