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 _______________________________________________ Hardwarehacking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/hardwarehacking
