How should they price it and what is the likely production cost?
a. Probably.
b. What the market will bear (which is not much, considering.)
c. Not much.
Cite: I still have a cheap-ass Trac-fone and it’s pretty much all I need. It initially cost all of $15.00, ten years ago or so. That may or may not have anything to do with the actual cost of production. Pricing and production cost are so distantly related that they can get married even in states that aren’t in the deep South. Generally you make your money by selling the service, not the hardware.
I just recently escorted a friend to an event held by a local organization for blind/visually impaired people. One of the displays was showing various cell phones & accessories that were available. There was a lot of traffic there – visitors were quite interested in finding phones that would work for them. (And those cheap trac phones were liked by many.
Also, there’s quite a market for cell phones designed specifically for the elderly (often sold at high prices). Just google that.
So there seems to be a market for that. And given the demographic trends of people living longer, being more active, and suffering more diseases that diminish visibility (like diabetes), it seems like this market will be growing.
My dad just got a new flip phone. He switched from Verizon (where he had a flip phone) to Consumer Cellular. The phone has bigger buttons on the keypad than a typical old flip phone. It’s also quite a bit lighter than his previous flip phone (probably just 5 years old) so it seems like it must have some updated technology.
The old “dumb” phones are also good for people who work in datacenters or similar top-secret places where cameras are forbidden.
It’s hard to find a dumb phone that doesn’t at least have a camera built in - even the cheapest of them seem to have this, these days.
I’m fortunate that I don’t work in such a facility, though for quite a while a client I visited with some regularity had such a rule. Fortunately, they changed that before I got my first camera-equipped phone 7 or 8 years ago.
If touch screens become insanely cheap and work well you might find the disappearance of the manual keys. Perhaps even the dumb phone will disappear replaced by a smartphone made to operate in dumb phone mode.
No matter how cheap they are, touch screen ‘buttons’ do not work well for blind people.
Whatever market exists for the dumb phone today will be pretty much zero within 10 years.
Mechanical key pads are still widely used and manufactured (tv remotes) and dumb phones seem to be sturdier, require less charging, and makes us less of zombies.
I think they could work for blind people, if modified. Change the color scheme to high-contrast monochrome, increase the button size (so those with visual impairments can see the text) and add feedback in the form of the number being read aloud as each button is pressed. Also, blind people can use things like Siri to place calls.
I’ve banked at Citibank for decades and they’ve had touchscreen ATMs for a long time. More than twenty years ago, I noticed an onscreen button offering assistance to the blind and visually impaired. I wondered the same thing about that, so I picked up the phone (they used to have a handset at each ATM that would connect immediately with customer service) to ask about this. The woman at the other end encouraged me to try pressing the button. The ATM switched to a monochrome mode with large buttons that would be visible to those with visual impairments.
And then there’s the military application. Yes to dumb non-lighting phones, especially behind enemy lines.
This is changing, the latest iteration of the iPhone combines the touch screen with vibration feedback that you are on a ‘active’ spot. It should be easy for a blind person to find a key, now finding the right key on a keyboard is still to achieved but it does speak to the possibilities. And for that matter a blind person could just ask Siri to dial mom, no key pressing needed.