[HH] $12 cell phone

[Tom Metro]

A blog posting that does a tear-down of a $12 GSM cell phone:

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=3040

It's a pretty ugly looking phone - short, wide, translucent green, with
a tiny display. But interesting how it is assembled using a single PCB
with no connectors, and no screws.

This reminds me of the story last Fall of an ad agency embedding an
Android smart phone in a limited run of magazine ads:
http://www.geek.com/mobile/fully-functional-android-phone-embedded-in-entertainment-weekly-1520099/

That was actually a much nicer phone.

The author also discusses how there is this parallel universe of
electronics manufacturers that exist in China that operate somewhat
isolated from the rest of the industrialized world and have little
concern for the intellectual property claims of Western chip companies.
The phone consists of two main chips by two different vendors, and each
vendor has legal claims against it from Western companies.

As someone pointed out in the comments, you can find name-brand (Nokia,
Samsung) feature phones selling for under $20 in the US via a carrier
with pre-paid plan, but other commenters seemed to think that even a
pre-paid phone will be partially subsidized.

The hardware is plenty cheap for embedding GSM radios in low-cost
devices now. The limiting factor for hobby and low-volume use is the
lack of low-cost, low-volume M2M (machine-to-machine) data plans. (If
you are dealing with large volumes, like say an Amazon putting radios in
their Kindles, then you have plenty of choices.) Most carriers don't
even admit to offering M2M plans. They wholesale the service through
brokers that specialize in it, who in turn resell the service along with
expensive network management tools and development kits, which prices
them out of the low-end.

Actually, checking in on a thread I started a few years ago asking about
low-volume M2M plans:
http://m2m.com/message/3991

I see someone has responded suggesting:
http://www.gprssim.com/

which is a T-Mobile and Rogers (Canada) reseller. They'll sell a SIM for
$10, and then data plans start at $5/month for 500K bytes/month in the
US, and $7.80 for 100K bytes/month in Canada.

Pretty cheap, but a single pool of data that can be shared across
multiple devices would be better.

 -Tom