I’m looking for a rough guide, I imagine that with the wonders of minuaturization, it couldn’t be that expensive. Maybe $20 if you strip out absolutely everything but the phone?
Single line, black and white screen, uses AA batteries rather than proprietry LiIon. Just enough memory for an address book.
Also, any idea why cell phones haven’t been integrated into more things? I would imagine that a laptop with built in cell phone would come in handy for emergency internet access and text messaging that doesn’t wear your thumbs to a nub.
It’s not the actual cell phone, but rather a cell tower saturation problem.
A tower can handle only so many cell devices before being saturated and needing an upgrade. If everything including toasters has a cell phone in it, you are going to need accounts/phone numbers for everything, and that’s expensive.
I bought a GPRS/EDGE (~ 256kbps) PCMCIA card for my laptop on ebay for $25.
It takes the SIM card from my phone and uses my data account. Getting a second account for my laptop is prohibitively expensive.
Maily because they way the service provides work these days is you need a separate account for each of these devices. Do you want a phone account plus a data modem account for your laptop or do you want a phone plus a cable for you laptop.
I read about a dirt cheap cell phone for developig countries, perhaps on cnet.com. IT was basically as you stated (LCD display, limited phonebook.).
IIRC the cost came in about $10 higher then planned, perhaps $35, but I’m not sure of the actual price anymore.
Actually the phonebook to me seems like a luxury and not to be included in such a phone, why do you think it is needed for basic cell phone function? Wouldn’t a white sticker you could stick on the back and write importaint numbers on be a cheaper solution? Really why is a phonebook needed?
Because memory has gotten so ridiculously cheap theres no point in really skimping on it. You need a certain amount of memory to contain the phone software in the first place, adding an extra 128K for address books would cost maybe a few pennies.
Is it possible to somehow get a dual account? so your laptop phone and your cell phone are tied to the same account but you can’t use them both at the same time.
Current networks tie an account to a phone number. And only one device can be tied to a phone number at a time. Even if you could clone it somehow, having both devices on accidentally would probably be deemed fraud by the tower and the account would be suspended.
If we come up with a new standard that allows devices on the network that have no phone number(say IPv6 IP only or just internal netword ESID etc.) then after we upgrade most of the towers in the world(hundreds of thousands) can we start making cell devices left and right. Until then…
Okay, so you can’t share accounts. But you can easily get pre-paid accounts that take no money to maintain providing you make no calls, albeit at slightly higher prices than planned accounts.
Why not just include a $5 pre-paid account with each phone which you could likely get from the provider at a discount rate since many people wont use up the full $5 of it.
You could probably build a basic cell phone (no screen, no address book, no nothin’) into a phone card for pennies. Buy the card with, say, $50 worth of service, and toss the card when it is used up.
Name one such cell phone provider? Even if you make no calls, you have to periodically “top up” with a new prepaid card to keep the phone number active. The cheapest I have ever seen is what I have. T-Mobile like to run every Christmas season (and also around June) an offer where if you buy a prepaid card for $25 or more it extends the minutes on the phone for a full year. Thus you can maintain the account for about $2 a month if you make no or few calls.
Instead of building a phone into a laptop, you can just use it in conjunction with one; my phone (and the one I had before it) has an infrared port and will function as a dialup modem - you just put the two devices next to each other and away you go. Don’t use it much that way now though.
Alternatively, there are PCMCIA GSM cards - you pop the SIM out of your phone, pop it in the card, insert in the laptop and you have a laptop with an inbuilt phone (well, more or less). There’s no compelling reason to integrate devices that are a)most commonly used separately, b)less convenient to use if both are combined and c)already owned by most people as separate units.
I don’t know about the US but the cell plan I’m on now in Australia is a monthly plan with no minimum spend. If I never made any calls, I would not pay a cent for it.