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Cell Phone Industry's Six Biggest Failed Schemes
adeelarshad82 writes "The tech world is for dreamers, schemers, and sometimes, scammers. Which is why it's no surprise that the cell phone industry isn't any different. In wake of the recent news about the Israeli mobile-phone firm Modu shutting its doors, mobile analyst Sascha Segan revisits six major failures in the cell phone industry, from using phones to create a peer-to-peer that would eliminate the need for wireless carriers to a company with a $225,000 phone."
Is it really too much to ask the /. editors to quickly look around the page for the crud-free one-page "print" version link and post that for us all instead...
http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=259387,00.asp?hidPrint=true
For one thing, the outrageous charges for text messages. Or making sure that every aspect of you using your phone gets the last little second out of you so that it takes away from your total minutes. Or not having phones that function as answering machines simultaneously as voice mail....the list goes on. They are really taking consumers for a ride.
darn, i though i was about to read about failed schemas. lololol that's so not normalized
What it really comes down to is that most of the good ideas in cell phones (a) have been done already or (b) are waiting for technologies in other areas to advance first. All those other not-so-good ideas have extremely limited appeal to the masses. Yet people and smaller companies continue their attempts to "innovate" in this marketplace, primarily because there appears at first glance to be such a huge amount of cash sloshing around in the cell phone arena. As it turns out, though, that money is pretty much locked up by the major players, so your Popeil-esque Great Idea But On A Cell Phone This Time is going nowhere.
If it was based on open standards and software rather than some guy's proprietary system looking for venture capitalists.
I cant wait to see the day that scumbags like Vodafone and AT&T&T are no longer necessary
You'd think when they charge you 10c per text message, that'd be something people reject. Especially when any random stranger can send you spam which you have to pay for.
God spoke to me.
They missed one of the biggest failures of all, Motorola's attempt to build a global satellite-based network. It cost the company over $5 billion USD. Some more details here.
FTFA: ...full of shady characters with inconsistent documentation.
In the mobile phone industry? Didn't see that coming.
Microsoft's Kin?
Reportedly MS has spent about a billion dollars on the Kin only to kill it after very poor sales. Part of the costs was the Danger acquisition (reportedly about $500 million), the engineering and R&D for 2 years. Then the marketing and launch costs. Numbers vary on actual sales but the highest estimate was about 10,000 units sold. In my book, that spells FAIL.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It's not a failure if it's still running. Financial failure perhaps but physically it's not broken. You can still buy and use the handsets today.
The Outcome: zzzPhone took some orders and shipped a small number of very low-quality phones. I heard crazier and crazier stories about Horowitz, all second-hand. For instance, he apparently hired a carver to make him a cell phone out of wood that he tried to insert working phone components into.
I found that a bit funny because making one is a course at a Finnish university. More pictures here, but with finnish text only.
I originally read about this in a magazine; apparently they solder the sim-card connecting leads so swapping operators requires some work.
all this time I thought celphones were a part of the tech industry, how silly of me to think technology could be anything other than PC's
I thought the Modu concept was pretty good. A basic phone that could plug into whatver expansion device (portable or not) you wanted to provide additional functionality . From the expansions on offer it looked like a goer. Wonder what killed it?
Boolean logic: True, False, and File not found.
This is how shit is MEANT to work, its Twenty Eleven forgodsake!
FWIW, here in South Africa we've got a similar situation, you can use any phone on any network, just swap out the SIM card. Receiving calls and texts also costs nothing. MAKING calls and SENDING texts on the other hand... is quite expensive. That's another issue though.
One thing I know, and that is that I am ignorant...
Surely WAP must have been the Windows Vista of the cellphone world?
The emphasis on one-hand use looks spot-on. I'd be curious to see a similar concept working up on some hacker-friendly smartphone (Maemo/Meego or Android).
-- Let's go Viridian.
I'm not getting even that from the article. I was hoping I'd go there and see some serious (if possibly misguided) attempts at innovation, but it turns out that at least half of them were never meant to be more than a scam in the first place.
The Peep guy for example seems to be a character who made a surrealistic string of companies punting surrealistic and often blatantly impossible products, especially where there were grant money to be won, but never actually had more of a product than some faked videos and sleight of hand tricks like peeling the logo off a fob and showing it as their super range-boosting gizmo for phones. He's gone through everything including impossible flying cars before. No, seriously. And actually seems to have gotten a huge grant for that too.
After following the link to more info about him (yeah, I know, I'll hand in my nerd card now for reading even more than TFA;) I just ended up having more respect for the dot-con bubble guys, or the likes of those behind the Phantom console, or that guy faking being almost there with a flying car for the last couple of decades. At least those stuck with a scam longer, which, if nothing else, takes chutzpah. This guy seems to average more than one scam company a year, and actually goes for several per such scam idea looking for funding.
In all fairness, I'm happier to know that money is locked up by the major players, than given to such scammers.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This is just one of the many reasons why cell phone companies limit the amount of data you can transfer every month with your cell phone. If it proves necessary, they will also use QoS methods to prevent smooth VOIP calls from being made over the data channels.