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$10 Paper Mobile Phone To Launch This Year
ROU Nuisance Value writes: "Made (mostly) out of recycled paper and coming this year. The Register article makes the phone sound like a non-hoax, and claims that companies like McDonald's are interested in mass distribution. If so, it's destined to replace AOL CDs as World's Most Annoying Giveaway. Inventor's Web site has pictures of prototypes but I'm willing to bet that call quality won't be worth the paper the phone's printed on. She promises a $20 laptop, too. Anybody know if the patents/inventor/company are for real?"
To make this work, you'd need one IC capable of doing all of the RF functions of the phone and implementing a microprocessor as well to do the protocol of the phone. We are talking about an 800 MHz RF signal here, and thus an IC that does both UHF linear analog circuits and digital logic functions - that is asking a lot of the IC process, unless you split it into two ICs and then you have to interconnect them. You'd need a crystal for a frequency standard. Microphone, earphone, and battery, and whatever discrete components it takes to glue this together. The rest of it is the "paper" part.
I think you can make it cheap, but I don't see it reaching the $20 price point unless the cell phone companies heavily subsidize it, which means you'd need a monthly charge.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
... the amount of electronics that is going to be thrown away in this way? I work at a small electronics firm, and from last year on it has been nearly impossible to get surface mount tantalum and ceramic capacitors.
Reason: they are being sold by the millions to manufacturers of cellphones. Who wants to sell a couple of hundred to small fish like us?
And this is for non-disposable cellphones only. Make them cheap and exposable, and demand will rise manyfold.
What I heard, at this moment, manufacturing capacity of tantalum capacitors is limited by the rate tantalum mines can dig up the raw materials.
For the surface mount ceramic capacitors, a similar situation exists for the palladium that is used in the end caps.
Any increase in demand will lead to a shortage, and suppliers will only deliver to the largest (not necessarily highest!) bidder.
Oh yes, although the phone is mainly made of paper instead of plastic, this does not mean that the components are as well...
Bruce writes: I think you can make it cheap, but I don't see it reaching the $20 price point unless the cell phone companies heavily subsidize it, which means you'd need a monthly charge.
I've seen Family Radio Service two-way radios for under $20 at Best Buy or one of those stores. They're operating at 467 MHz, so it's lower, but in the ballpark. And unlike this phone, they have an audio amp & real speaker, replacable battery, multi-part plastic housing (at least three molds - front, back, and battery door, likely requiring manual assembly), real (non-membrane) buttons, external antenna (rather than a loop antenna on the circuit board), and probably some LED and/or LCD info (can't remember offhand). Just the packaging on these things, with two-piece vacuum molded clear plastic with an eye-grabbing four-color insert, are relatively expensive.
Strip all that out using an earphone you stick in your ear, one-use battery placed & soldered as a circuit board component, no case (it's integrated with the circuit board), no display or blinking lights, basically cheap out on any component you can, and $10 seems quite feasible with mass market production.
I don't know about the stuff specific to cell phones, but I've designed circuits with short-range 300-433 MHz data transceivers. It's a different RF thing altogether, but even in quantities of a few dozen, you can build them for under $20 (production cost not consumer price).
"Imagine, a mathimatical calculator, given away for free, the size of a bussness card. Who could belive such a thing, I bet it's a hoax, total vapor."
This stuff is going to get cheaper and cheaper. I don't see why it couldn't exist. And after all, in most places in the US you can pick up a phone for free a long with a serive agreement. Notice that this thing doesn't use it's own speakers/mic, so it's really nothing more then electronics.
Amber Yuan 2k A.D
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
if you look hard enough. Look at everyone claming that the Mac cube image was fake "Look at the shadows, they don't line up! there's no way this is real, I know my Photoshop." Proclaimed one mac site. Sure enough, the photo was exactly the same one use by Apple a couple of days later. Most of the good celeb fakes look more real then the real pics (skin tone differences between face and body are more likely in real images then fake ones.)
If the photo was fake then the buttons would have lined up perfectly, pixel for pixel.
Amber Yuan 2k A.D
"and dear god does this website suck now." -- CmdrTaco
"The numbers on the buttons of the phone do not line up, and seem to have been cut and pasted using an imaging program."
It's possible they were, but it still doesn't mean it's fake. The phone is made of paper, including the buttons.
I actually was reading about this 'technological' idea on some stupid free-energy website. The site was talking about creating Bifield-Brown Disks (Flying Saucers made of huge capacitors). Well building your own capacitors at home is a real pain if you are to make them according to the Biefield-Brown instructions, ergo: some-one came up with this nifty idea:
Because you are layering conductive material upon non-conductive material (thousands upon thousands of layers); it becomes a real problem to layer them accurately by hand. So, somebody thought of using a fairly conductive ink-type, and simply printing the conductor pattern on a sheet of paper, which would act as a non-conductor.
Basically, a Printed-Circuit-Board printed on standard white paper using some variation of standard printer ink. Now, other applications of this technology with better ink, and different forms of paper would allow (through layoring) the creation of basic gates, basic components (resistors, capacitors, diodes?) and easiest of all, buttons such as the ones shown on the face of the phone.
I won't disagree with you here, they do look fake to me also, but the technology is possible. You know, come to think of it; maybe I'll get to work on my own paper circuitry. 8-)
Ace
I agree with you. Unfortunately, we (Americans and most of the developed world) live in a society that views disposible products as convenient and useful and does not really care about the ecological costs involved. AOL CDs are a good example of this (convenient and useful from AOL's perspective of course).
You just inspired an idea that could save California - turn a national liability into a national asset - that's right - collect all those AOL CDs that pollute our environment, glue them to sheets of plywood (reflective side facing up), and make huge mirror-based solar farms - free!
Plus, you get more (and more useful) "free hours" out of each and every CD this way.
I calculate each reasonably sized solar farm would want a good two million AOL CDs, so if we build enough farms, we could quite possibly put a noticeable dent in the number of AOL CDs floating around.
I wonder if I can patent this...
Yeah, there was an article on this in Newsweek a while back (many months ago at least). AFAIK, the inventor and company is completely real, and it seems like a valid idea. The quality won't be top-notch, but there are a lot of corners that can be cut. These would be particularly good for people like me who would only want a cell phone so they can call in case they really have to and they're far away from a real phone. Voila! A thirty-minute disposable phone!
The phones, 300 million of which should be produced in the US in the first year, are due to be unleashed on the US market in the third quarter of 2001.
That's more that one phone for each citizen of the U.S. Pretty big first run of a new product, wouldn't you say? And where's the battery? And what wireless network are they going to unleash these 300 million phones on, exactly?
My pal at CMU has been checking out a demo on loan (Electronic engineering major or something.) and says it's legitimate. (Not incredibly high-quality, though of course. He says it's like disposable cameras.)
She promises a $20 laptop, too.
OK I need sleep... I first read that as "a $20 lapdance."
I blame society.
Sometimes nothing is a real cool hand.
fax me the phone, will you?
http://www.statepress.com/columns/hepp/index.html
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--- There is a man in a smiling bag.
Why do we create disposable products when reusable ones can be manufactured for just as little cash? These products are not recyclable and will probably release toxic materials as they degrade in a landfill. Why not create an inexpensive phone which can be recharged and used more than once? Oh yeah, then the manufactures wouldn't have the constant stream of revenue from users who used up the battery life.
This seems to be a ploy from the cellular providers to get people who can't afford calling plans to begin using mobile phones and, eventually, they will buy a 'real' cell phone. At that time the mobile providers can lock the users into a contract with outrageous termination fees. They are borrowing the drug dealer's business model -- give the first hit and you'll have a cell phone junkie for life.
-josh
fear is the mind killer
Wow. It seems to me that this'd really be a huge boon to people whose phones are monitored (ie, drug lords, mafiosos, etc) -- they just have to buy one of these suckers, then toss it away in a few hours.