4 ms·
It can be done cheaper, too, and will be, since there is a large user population in Africa/India/etc whose only problem with a $12 phone is that it costs $12 to
by patio11 14y ago
It can be done cheaper, too, and will be, since there is a large user population in Africa/India/etc whose only problem with a $12 phone is that it costs $12 too much. Eventually they'll be cheap enough to put in cereal boxes. (That won't happen, because brightly colored bits of plastic have higher perceived value than crippled phones among people who buy cereal, but they'll still be lifechanging devices in much of the world.)
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- amalag 14y agoIndia/Africa spend a huge amount of money on phones. $12 is absolutely no problem. It is less than what they pay now.
- JoeAltmaier 14y agoBut isn't texting the favored use? Actually making a call is often impractical with spotty cell coverage. In the Philippines apparently most folks text. Signal is occasional; text messages eventually get through automatically as you travel around during the day while a call is only possible at those brief times of connectivity. Anyway, can this $12 phone text?
- dan1234 14y agoSMS is a pretty basic part of the GSM standard so, if it didn't support it (assuming it's a GSM phone, of course)
- JoeAltmaier 14y agoBut I don't see a keyboard; I doubt its a touch-screen. So no way to enter texts?
- mumphster 14y agoUh do you not see the letters on the number keys there. Did you ever own a phone before smart phones?
- zodiac 14y agothere's a numeric keypad to enter texts with (press 7 three times to type r, etc)
- Shivetya 14y agosince costs and efficiency are key, do away with lower case at this price point.
- ljf 14y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T9_(predictive_text) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T9_(predictive_text) maybe? Doubt they have the liecence, but it's a very fast way of typing. With an old Nokia 8250 - I can type pretty fast with the phone in my pocket - muscle memory for the win!
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- patio11 14y agoThe world is a big place, and while it includes people who spend quite a bit of money on phones, it also includes another billion or so people who don't have one yet, chiefly for economic reasons.
- phreeza 14y agoI think this is not going to have the huge impact you might imagine. Less than a billion people in the world remain without access to a cellphone now[0], and the ones that remain will probaby not have their lives transformed by a x$ cellphone. My guess would be that they either don't want/need one (too young, too old, religous reasons) or are in such utter destitution that a cellphone is unlikely to adress the underlying causes of their poverty, eg acute famine, civil war, etc. [0]http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFactsFigures2011.pdf http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFa...