Cell Phone On A Chip

sebFlyte writes "Texas Instruments have developed a new chip for mobiles that, according to some, should make is possible to make a cell phone for less than $25, bringing it into the realm of possibilities for low-level corporate giveaways, or a reasonable loss leader for getting people started on pay-as-you go mobile offerings."

Comments

Start with just making PHONES

[Trolling4Columbine]

I don't want to take pictures with my phone.
I don't want to play MP3s with my phone.
I don't want to check my e-mail with my phone.
I don't want to browse the web with my phone.
I don't want to play games with my phone.

I just want to make phone calls with my phone. Want to lower the average price of a cell-phone? Start with taking all of that crap out of it.

Re:Start with just making PHONES

[GeorgeH]

I don't want to edit pictures with my gaming computer.
I don't want to play MP3s with picture editing computer.
I don't want to check my e-mail with my MP3 computer.
I don't want to browse the web with my e-mail computer.
I don't want to play games with my web browsing computer.

I just want to type documents in Word with my computer. Want to lower the average price of a computer? Start with taking all of that crap out of it.

A solution looking for a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem isn't the cost of the phone. It's the cost of the service that keeps me out of the market.

Re:paper cell?

[Smallpond]

They folded.

Hah! I kill me.

invisible cells

[Doc Ruby]

Putting a "cellphone" on a chip for $10 is not just good news for cheap "cellphones". It's great news for putting everything on the Internet, along with the simple human interface that is the 12-key pad and voice. Back through the early 20th Century, motors were big, complex, inefficient and expensive enough that motors were a separate industry. Factories used to have a single motor, like a mill or animal-driven cogwheel, its power distributed through the enterprise over pulleys, ropes and chains. Once motors became cheap commodities, simple to integrate, motors became commonplace enough to become invisible, and the motor industry was subsumed into the larger electronics and transportation industries they enable. Now that cellphones are becoming similarly mundane components, we can start to forget about them, and the era when immediate communication among people and devices required a second thought.

Maximum Functionality at Minimal Price Point

[reporter]

The marketing idea that Texas Instruments (TI) has developed is a rehash of an old idea: set a low price point and maximize the amount of functionality that can be sold at that point. One of the earliest examples is the VIC-20 computer from Commodore. It set the price of the contraption at (I think) $199.95, and then the engineers put as much functionality as they could into the product at the price point. The VIC was a smashing success even though William Shatner (ouch!) served as the spokesmodel.

Here, TI is setting a low price point for the chip/chipset and cramming as much functionality as TI's engineers can force into the chip/chipset. Over time, such efforts become easier because the feature size of integrated circuits becomes smaller, and you can simply put more "stuff" into a fixed area of chip. Further, the area of the chip determines its price to a first-order approximation.

I wish that someone would do another VIC-20. For $200.00, I bet that we could get an awesome computer, but I doubt that any of the traditional companies like HP, IBM, and Sony would be interested. The profit margin would be minimal. So, these companies continue to set a high price point, say, $2000.00, and sell a system with commensurate functionality -- a lot of functionality that I simply do not need for reading e-mail and posting articles to SlashDot.