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Cell Phone Industry's Six Biggest Failed Schemes

Posted by timothy on from the modu's-idea-was-pretty-cool dept.

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."

3 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. Is it really too much to ask by choongiri · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

    1. Re:Is it really too much to ask by choongiri · · Score: 5, Informative

      The *only* reason is to increase page views, and thus ad impressions.

  2. Re:10c text messages by jeff4747 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Text messages aren't sent over the data channel.

    Oversimplified version: Text messages are embedded in normal GSM packets. Most of these packets are essentially "are you there" messages and are sent frequently between the device and the tower. "Are you there" doesn't fill an entire packet. So cell phone companies came up with SMS to fill the rest of the packet. SMS is essentially free for the cellular providers to handle because it's using part of the timeslice that would otherwise go to waste.

    So you won't need to worry about wireless bandwidth costs. If the device can attach to a cell tower, it's got all the bandwidth it needs for SMS.