Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
Main problem I'd see with this from a practical point of view is reduced battery life. If your phone was spending a good deal of time acting as a repeater the standby time would be similar to current talk times.
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.
P2P would(barring some very clever design or a focus more or less exclusively on walkie-talkie use cases) likely be a poor candidate for cell phone use(lousy latency, uncertain availability, battery life of nodes...) P2P works pretty well for cheap transfers of big files; but somewhat less well for low-bandwidth, but latency sensitive, stuff.
The system that I would like to see would be a radically free market(and thus, likely never to be seen in the cellular arena) system of phones that electronically bid for resources in real time, from carriers within range who dynamically compete for customers in real time.
Consider a basic example: I have a cellphone with a GSM module that can see two or three carriers' towers, and a wifi module that can detect a number of access points. I open my address book, or start typing in a number. Detecting that I am going to be making a call, my phone checks the rate information being broadcast from the wireless links visible to it: it then silently routes the call out through whichever offers the lowest rate. In order to prevent surprises, the user could, of course, set "absolute ceiling", "manual verify", and "warn but continue" price thresholds within their phone's bidding engine. Towers, for their part, could dynamically adjust prices, down to the operator's set floor, in order to keep themselves busy but not over-saturated.
Data would be handled in a similar manner: cell towers and wifi access points could broadcast their willingness to provide, and rate(at home, of course, your router would treat you as a special case of free access, to ensure that you always used the bandwidth you had already paid for, and applications requiring data could choose based on price.
Since most people would not want to trouble themselves with the details, phones would, ideally, ship with some sensible defaults and a few heuristic rules(ie. if I almost always make long calls to contact X, and very short ones to contact Y, select a carrier for contact X based on lowest expected price for a long call, and select a carrier for contact Y based on lowest expected price for a short call). For those who did wish to dig deep and twiddle all the knobs, the tools for expressing and solving optimization problems in multiple constraints to computer systems are not exactly terra incognita. The real propellerheads could have their handsets algorithmically trading off between lower and higher power-requirement connections based on batterly life and location/time based estimates of next charge, and whatever other variables they felt like including...
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.
I'm guessing that it would go over about as well as poor old "cablecard", which was largely murdered in the cradle despite being far less radical.(Or, for that matter, if SIM unlocking is too scary for them, this idea would have them shitting bricks, since it amounts to phones that automatically swap SIMs every second or so, depending on price...)
In theory, though, there would be nothing preventing "traditional" style cellphone contracts(other than cheaper competition potentially making them foolish).
I deliberately modeled the notion on that of electronic market trading, in which context a traditional cell contract would be, in essence, a "minutes/SMS/data option contract". Instead of buying my minutes at the market price where and when I need them, I purchase an "option" on X minutes, Y SMSes and Z megabytes to be delivered in the following month, at a set rate(presumably for a discount over the expected spot prices).
Again, having to have a finance degree just to make a phone call won't really appeal to most people, so I would invoke the "sane defaults" notion and hope for the best; but the explicit parallels to common financial instruments, along with automated transaction engines, open up some fascinating possibilities for enthusiasts(as well as, in theory, helping networks cope with congestion: heavily congested regions would be more expensive for spot-price users, encouraging them to moderate usage; but they would also be most profitable for local wifi operators, temporary telco cell trucks, etc. to set up shop...)
It seems like a huge number of potentially interesting technical solutions have a messy social problem sitting in their way.
In wonder if that is the real reason why engineers are statistically more likely to be driven to extremism? All those elegant systems, and models, and protocols, being sacrificed on the altar of shareholder value by besuited simians...
Maybe, the chinese phones with 3 SIM slots can be used to do such a thing without requiring the networks to decide. These phones have 2/3 radios & sim slots - they all work simultaneously - you can receive any call from all 2/3 nos and set a preference or select one while dialing out. People have 2 or 3 sim card phones and select which no to use to dial out depending on tariff etc. Quite common in India/China/etc Though i personally never liked having 2/3 nos or worrying so much about call charges, but yes, i would be interested in using data in such a way.
I'd love to see that technology become common in the US for a completely different reason, and that is to separate work data and home data. Combine this with virtualization, and this would be great for people who use their devices for work and home stuff. Leave a job and the IT staff sends a self-destruct signal? It only gets rid of the work based VM.
Done right, it can be made decently secure as well.
Of course, having the ability to switch SIMs for one machine is cool too, not just for cheap call rates. Say provider "A" is 4G but has a pathetic limit, provider "B" has 4G, but charges fees after a gig or two, and provider "C" is 3G, but is unlimited. The phone can use provider "A" until the bandwidth is exhausted, switch to provider "B", then to "C", until the month resets and "A" is useful again. Add QoS so important traffic (E-mail) goes over one link and other stuff goes over another, and this would be a very good thing (tm) to have.
Even more ironic -- the providers in Asia use R/UIM cards, which are functionally identical in size and shape to SIM cards, but are for CDMA networks. Combine this with a radio that handles CDMA and GSM, and even the US's big divide between providers can be bridged to allow one device to work anywhere. Hopefully everyone adapting LTE will make the need for SIM versus R/UIM cards not needed, but who knows. I'm afraid the CDMA providers won't use SIM technology when LTE comes online, so even if a device is LTE based, a provider can just say no when a customer calls and begs for it to be activated.